Boot drive on Power Mac G4

[Ian Goddard]

I have a Mac G4 with two hard drives installed. The Main drive (original) is a 38.18 GB. The Second drive - (I added later) is a 149.05 GB. It has Mac OS X 10.4.11 installed. This Mac does not have a DVD drive, only CD-RW. Also, I have no critical data on here - I use it as a utility machine. It is in a network with an iMac and Windows XP machine.

My problem is that the Main drive is now "full" - only 483 MB available. I have uninstalled all "non-essential" applications but find it often gives me a "Your Startup Drive is Full" message.

How can I make the second drive the "main" - boot drive?

OR, and I thought I knew everything - can I install applications like iTunes, Adobe reader, Microsoft Office on the second drive and run them from there? - If so, how would I do that?

Any advise and help will be appreciated.

 

[DICKSTER]

Ian---I think you can open your system preferences >open startup disc and select the second drive as your boot drive. Do a restart after you have done this. Might work for you.
Dickster-----------------

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

If you mean to say that you have 10.4.11 installed on the original drive, and you have an extra 150GB drive, then you can "clone" the system from the original drive to the secondary drive with a utility like Carbon Copy Cloner.

You can then use the second drive to boot your Mac.

 

[Ian Goddard]

Ian---I think you can open your system preferences >open startup disc and select the second drive as your boot drive. Do a restart after you have done this. Might work for you.
Dickster-----------------

Hi Dickster,

Many thanks for your response; unfortunately the second drive does not show up in the system preferences. I am going to try ElDiabloConCaca's solution. Currently I am cloning the main drive to the second drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. This indicates that the clone will be bootable. It's going to take awhile but will post results asap. Thanks again - your interest is very much appreciated.

 

[Ian Goddard]

If you mean to say that you have 10.4.11 installed on the original drive, and you have an extra 150GB drive, then you can "clone" the system from the original drive to the secondary drive with a utility like Carbon Copy Cloner.

You can then use the second drive to boot your Mac.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone main drive to 2nd drive - solved it! This solution allows me to boot from either drive and/or to to delete Microsoft Office and other drive hogs on main drive so that it runs cleaner and use these programs on second drive where I can now save files on the same drive as the application - got to be better! Many thanks for the tip. Hope this helps others - Carbon Copy Cloner is great and worth a contribution.