REVIEW: LaCie Mini 250GB (Slight Return)
Recently you may have noticed that Apple released version 10.4.6 of OSX. You may also remember, fromhere that when I installed OSX on an external LaCie Mini drive I had "issues" upgrading beyond 10.4.3. Well there've been a few well publicised OSX security issues that I had not been able to install and was getting a bit nervous, because clearly anyone who is anyone would want to hack into my machine. So when 10.4.6 came out and said nothing about Firewire in the release notes I decided to give it a go anyway.
And what do you know? I got it to work. Being the helpful chap I am, I posted on MacInTouch with my experiences and, well, it is only right that I share them here too.
So here's what I wrote:
My mini has OSX installed on an external Lacie drive and the 10.4.4 and 10.4.5 upgrades killed the install every time. I would install, reboot and get a kernel panic. This happened no matter what sequence I did upgrades in, whether I did 10.4.1 to 10.4.3 first, used combo or delta upgrades or anything. So I have been stuck with 10.4.3 for a while
Yesterday I tried 10.4.6. First I upgraded the OSX on the Mini's inisternal drive with the firewire drive disconnected. Once that was working I reconnected the firewire drive, booted to it and did the upgrade. Every time a reboot was required I held the option key so as to force the bootloader. I don't know if this actually helps, but seeing as the firewire drive started making a noise each time it felt like it was forcing a mount before booting. To cut a longer story short, doing this saw my Mini boot off the firewire drive perfectly each time and I now have a working 10.4.6 off an external drive, whereas the previous two upgrades didn't work for me at all.
Whether the option key thing was the difference or something was fixed with the upgrade I don't know, but all I can say is that I am happy now so maybe others who had issues with booting off an external drive of late may want to give it ago.
Remember to backup first though!
Hopefully that'lll help some of the many people whom, according to our Apache logs, come to Mindre Panda via Google looking for answers to why their machine is crashing with a LaCie external firewire drive.
M Panda
