So I hear that I can install OS X on an external Fire Wire HD and boot from it on my eMac.
Now I am wondering if can buy any external firewire HD enclosure and use it for this purpose, or do only certain brands work?

Mac's hardware with FW connections have a minimal SBP2 driver in the firmware. So they can mount FW devices using this protocol.

You can also put a Mac with FW in target mode, and uses its internal HD by FW, to boot or just access data from another computer.

[ Edited by Yomgui on 2011/2/18 9:28 ]

How is that done more precisely?

I have a Lacie firewire HD placed under my MacMini. I would like to try CruxPPC or something on it. http://cruxppc.org/

So any enclosure should work then?

I decided to give it a go with this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200357960798&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT

If it don't work, I'll just sell it or use it with my PC.

John: To dual boot you need to hold down certain keys during boot time. Though, I forget what keys they were off hand as I've not done this in a couple of weeks, but that's the secret, you can get in and configure your Mac to do all sorts of things, including not play the token Apple boot up sound.

@XDelusion:

1394 norm defines only SBP2 as a sort of mass-storage (in fact it's a SCSI cmd over FW protocol).

99.9999% of bridge chipsets use this norm, so any enclosure should work.
But as always, norms are never understood or/and strictly followed: so some chipsets don't work well with Helios for example, like some oxford series.

But MacOS-X handles them very well

Should work. I use some 2 1/2" iomega fw drive to boot OS X. I think that is the most convenient way for a dual boot system when OS X is used only rarely. No annoying boot menu, just plug in the firewire before you power on/reset if you want to boot OS X.
Performance of a fw drive as system drive is good enough.

To boot into target disk mode in OS X you hold the "T" key at bootup. This turns any mac into an external firewire drive basicly, if your using 10.5 you can boot a USB 2.0 drive as well as a firewire drive. The drive needs to formated as a bootable device in disk utility and you hold the option key down during boot up. You will get a boot menu that will list the devices you can boot from at that point and simple use the mouse to click the one you want to boot off of.

[ Edited by Acill on 2011/2/18 11:04 ]

Quote:

I'm not sure I'm following this correctly.
I think I might be confused by "To boot into target disk mode in OS X you hold the "T" key at bootup. This turns any mac into an external firewire drive basicly".
Does this allow a Mac to boot from an external drive or does it "turn(s) any mac into an external firewire drive"?

Quote:
turn(s) any mac into an external firewire drive

Booting from FW can be done using the usual boot menu (alt key).

[ Edited by Piru on 2011/2/19 2:33 ]

Thanks Piru.

So how bad is the performance hit if booting from Firewire? Would I be ahead just to partion my internal drive and install OS X on it along side MorphOS?

Quote:
With firewire 400 it's upto 49MB/s, and firewire 800 upto 96MB/s. With FW800 it's mostly limited by the drive speed (I typically get 70MB/s from normal HDDs).

FW400: slightly slower but not much
FW800: Should be pretty much identical to internal HDD speed

[ Edited by Piru on 2011/2/19 21:23 ]

Aghhh.... well now I wish I'd have gotten an 800. Oh well, it's only OS X, I'm sure I won't be using it much if at all. In fact I'm not even sure why I want to install it? Oh ya...

Jedi Outcast!!!! Damn I wish Lucas Arts/Raven Soft would open source that puppy so we could possibly have a port. :(

eMac has FW400 only anyway.

Oh, well great then!!! :)