I booted from a USB drive...

[szavo]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Well, I've checked around. The Knowledge Base says, pretty bluntly, not to do this...What exact Mac do you have? Is it recent?

OK, I will plan on continuing to backup to the USB drive, but will follow the steps in section 5 to restore from Disk Utility on the install DVD in the event of a catastrophe.

To answer your question about my computer: flatpanel iMac (tray loading CD drive) about two years old: 1 Ghz powerpc G4, 768 MB RAM.

One explanation might be that both times I booted from the external USB drive, I also had my external firewire (without a bootable partition) hooked up. This is the novice in me again, but I am wondering whether the computer detects the firewire drive and the USB drive, and goes ahead and boots from the USB drive thinking it is the firewire.

Lastly, some SuperDuper!-related questions (my apologies for so far taking up your time with hardware issues)...

1) If I do regular backups is there any reason to do a safety clone?
2) The safety clone is useless (if it's on a partition of the internal HD) if the whole HD crashes, right? So the safest backup strategy is to backup to an external drive regularly, yes?
3) I love SuperDuper! (not really a question).

Cheers,
Steve