Encypted Bootable Disk Image?

[jshea@alum.dart]

I have a 250gb external hard drive that I leave in my office, and would like to backup my iBook to. Ideally I'd like to be able to Smart Update the backup, boot from it, and I'd like it to be encrypted (because I'm not all that excited about leaving my whole hard drive lying around, unprotected.)

On a whim, I made a big, bank, encrypted disk image on the firewire drive with Disk Utility, and ran a Complete Backup to it, and that all went great. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), if I try to boot from the firewire drive (by holding down option during boot, and selecting it) my bios isn't able to figure out that there is a bootable disk image on the drive, and the boot barfs.

Is there anyway to salvage this technique, perhaps by somehow mounting the disk image during bootup? Or can anyone think of something else I should try?

Thanks,

-Jon

[dnanian]

There's no way to boot from an image, Jon -- it just won't work. But, once restored, the result is bootable... if you check out section 5 of the User's Guide, I go through an emergency restore process, using an image and your Panther install disks. That should work for you...