Installing mac os x on external firewire drive

The internal 30gb hard drive on my titanium 667 apparently is giving out on me. I hear clicking sounds and upon powering up, the screen stays on the apple logo and never boots up. Diagnosis?

I was wondering if it were possible for me to install the mac os on an external firewire drive and boot up and operate my powerbook from there. is this even possible? How do i get the os copied on that external drive anyway? when i tried it from my friends mac, the firewire drive never appeared on the list of destination drives to install the os on. any clues?

how can i retrieve my data from my internal drive? when i started up on target disk mode i was able to see my hard drive on my friends' mac. when i opened it the spiining pizza kept coming on, i was able to save 2 files to her drive but every time i attempt it again, the pizza carousel comes on to brighten my day.

please help.


thanks.

You can install and boot from the external firewire drive. It has to be formated for Mac OS X first though. Once its formatted properly, it should appear in the destination options for installing OS X.

is it possible to format the drive for mac using a pc? this would be my only option since i can't use my mac.

Connect the FW drive to your Mac.
Power up your Mac. (The internal HD isn't needed to load the OS on an external drive.)
Install the CD/DVD and hold down the "C" button.
Once the installer is up and running, from the "Utilities" menu, Disk Utility will let you prep the drive for use.
Continue the installation process.

I used SuperDuper to clone my OS X drive to a partition on my 320Gb external Firewire drive, and it made it bootable too, so I can everything from the external drive.