Dear MediaSmart users:

I was wondering since it didn't specify in the help documentation what size of a USB flash drive I would need to copy the necessary files from the Mac to the flash drive. What are the exact steps (or where can I find them in the help documentation?) I am asking now in the event that a system crash occurs on my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard 10.6.4 . I have an HP MediaSmart server EX 495 .

Sincerely,
markerline

Are you referring to a complete restore? Like a Time Machine restore or are you simply talking about restoring Snow Leopard? If you are talking about a full blown Time Machine restore then the USB drive will need to be at least as big as your Macs hard drive. If you are looking for an OS restore and start up then check out this link-

http://www.maciverse.com/install-boot-o ... drive.html

This explains how to put OSX on a flash drive and boot from it in case of system crash. You will need at least an 8GB flash drive for this.

Take care.

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Marc

EX475 - 5.5 TB Total - 3.5TB MSS w Rosewill RSV-S5(2TB Backup Pool)- LE-1640 (AMD X2 BE-2350 unstable) - 2GB Ram
2.5 Unofficial Software Update/Time Machine Backup
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24" iMac, 2 MacBook Pros
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There is a way to get a WHS Time Machine backup to appear as a network drive when running a restore from the Apple install CD's. My guess is that this is what the OP's question is about. What you linked was how to install a working copy of OS X on a flash drive (which can actually be done from an iPod, believe it or not). Two different things, of course, though perhaps related. (I don't know the answer to the OP's question because I decided WHS isn't reliable enough at this point in the game to store TM backups on).

Do you trust a non-RAID USB hard drive to store your Time Machine backups?

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

When in doubt, try it... About 5MB for the USB drive, looks like. And page 209 in the manual or this support page: link to HP site.

And no, I didn't attempt a recovery on my machine. I separately keep a bootable clone on an external FW800 drive. If my boot drive fails then I'll boot into the external drive and figure out what I need to do next

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