Mac Forum / General / General / July 2006

Adaptec ACS-200 hard drive enclosure Combo
usb/firewire works fine on my old Mac-mini
using the supplied firewire cable and an 80gb
Seagate 3.5in drive I had on hand.

First initialized the seagate using Disk Utility
and then did a whole drive random write (8x)
which took about 48 hours to complete. Then
created 2 partitions: a 14gb and a ~62gb.
My internal 80gb hd has just under 10gb OS+data so
the 14gb partition will offer sufficient
space for backups for the forseeable future.

Downloaded the latest version of SuperDuper from
www.versiontracker.com and made the
backup to the 14gb partition on the external
harddrive. Flawless and easy software program
for this backup chore.

Rebooted Mac-mini and went into
Apple>preferences>startup or something to that
effect
and chose the new startup disc. Then rebooted
again and could see the ext drive LED
flashing as the system was brought up. For proof I
went into Disk Utility and 'got info' on
each of the partitions and, yes, now the 14gb was
"/" meaning that it was the boot drive
for this session. Subsequent bootups have all been
with this ext drive without my having
to choose anything.

The internal drive apparently is now in sleep mode
as I don't hear it or use it either. The
system is a good bit snappier with the 3.5in
harddrive as you would expect. Not sure if
I've yet seen the dreaded spinning beachball. My
ram is still the abysmally small 256mb.

The 80gb Seagate has suffered partition loss in a
wintel box so I took the time here to be
sure it was undamaged. Disk Utility reported no
errors after the 8x random write test;
likewise the partitioning.

I was about to buy a usb ext enclosure when I
remembered that the Mac-mini would
only boot with a firewire external. With the
nearest Apple store being 50 miles away I
tried Best Buy and they had at least a couple
combo ext drives complete with harddrives,
but also had this Adaptec empty ext case for
$72-US which I grabbed. You can probably
get it cheaper by mail but I needed to backup the
year old Mac-mini immediately. He
who loses data on a second system in the same week
be a fool!!

Also, I had setup the Mac-mini NOT to ask for
password each time, so naturally this
fool lost it. And SuperDuper absolutely requires
it. The Apple literature does not say so
but you *can* bootup with the Install CD (while
holding down the C key), choose: create
new password and then exit immediately.

This particular Firewire external drive DOES WORK-
not all do!! Hope this helps others
who have put off backing up their Mac-minis for
too long.