[Macpartners] Non-bootable firewire drives

[Kerem B Limon]

Quoting David M Rosenberg <rosenberg at MIT.EDU>:

> I recently was shopping at the GovConnection web site for a
> Macintosh-compatible firewire external disk drive. I selected the
> IOGear GHD135C200 - a combination Firewire (400), USB 2.0, and USB 1.1
> external drive. (The "GHD135C" part of the product code describes the
> enclosure and combination firewire and USB controller. The "200" part
> of the product code describes the disk capacity.)
> 
> I found that I could partition in the disk and read and write from
> files, but that I couldn't boot from it. IOGear tech support sent me a
> message saying "The only drive we sell that is bootable is the GHD335
> series." GovConnection is being very cooperative and allowing me to
> exchange the IOGear GHD135C200 for an IOGear GHD335C200.
> 
> My "heads up" to other Mac users is that Macintosh-compatible doesn't
> necessarily mean Macintosh-bootable. Neither the GovConnection web
> pages nor the IOGear web pages state which drives are or aren't
> bootable. The GovConnection tech support people (mistakenly) believed
> that the IOGear GHD135C200 was bootable. I guess my suggestion is that

I find that GovConnection folks are often off-base when it comes to
compatibility questions. I don't blame them so much as they are probably
provided with whatever the manufacturer publishes, and rely on that info.
However, this can be a costly issue if you're depending on their advice. For
instance, we recently acquired a couple of multi-thousand dollar which we were
assured were compatible with existing IBM docking stations we had--they simply
weren't, and had it not been for my foresight in ordering two new docking
stations, they'd be useless until we got those. I suggest always checking with
the manufacturer, and better yet, Googling for product reviews. Even
IBM/Lenovo's own pages mistakenly claimed backwards docking station
compatibility in our case, for instance.

-Kerem


> if you don't see a statement in writing that a firewire drive is
> bootable (and it matters to you), confirm that feature with the
> manufacturer.
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Kerem B. Limon
kerem.limon at mit.edu /e-mail