need a HDD external firewire caddy that I can boot from

[Punjabi Geezer]

Basically I'm getting a laptop which has according to the owner "has eaten two hard drives. It has a P3 1GHz processor and 256Mb RAM and boots up, although obviously won't read from the fitted hard drive." and he's generously giving it to me for free :D

It has got a firewire port so I'm presuming that if I get a caddy I can just use my regular 40gig HDD in there but not sure if the laptop will boot from it. Anyone know if it is possible and reccomendations on which caddy to get, obvisouly the cheaper the better!

[sjg1]

Depends entirely on the BIOS, although I've not personally seen one that will (some support booting from USB though).

Booting from external firewire drives is something Macs have done for years though :)

[Punjabi Geezer]

DOH! guess I'll have to check the bios when I get it but in the meantime any reccomendations on caddies?

[threadkiller]

anything with an oxford 911 chipset will do, I believe SVP do them.

IIRC you can't boot from a Firewire especially on a laptop, the bios won't support it, especially one that old.

[Punjabi Geezer]

Just had an idea. Can I create a boot disc/cd with some kind of software bios to tell it to then boot from firewire? If so any ideas what software?

I remember doing this many years ago with my old pc, as my HDD was bigger than the motherboard could handle so I had a boot disc which ran a software bios.

[SadMac]

My current motherboard (A7N8X-E) will support booting from firewire/usb devices, but it seems to be a very recent addition to the things.

[Punjabi Geezer]

anyone know software to make an appropriate boot disc?

[dan13l]

You'd need a dos driver for whatever firewire chipset is in the laptop - google it and you might get lucky.

[Punjabi Geezer]

dan, if I find the driver what would I need to put onto the CD to get it to boot up the hard drive?