Q: mac pro drives not listed in order in Disk Utility

Which drive (bay) is your boot drive?

How are they listed in System Profiler?

And finally I don't believe there is any requirement that DU list them in bay order.  I think it just gets them in the order or reverse order they appear on the internal device list, or maybe alphabetical order, or whatever.  Mine are not listed in bay order either in DU.  Indeed, bay 1, my boot ssd is listed last, just before it lists the dvd.

Who cares where they are on the list so long as they are all there!

The problem for me here is that I am going to want to replace Bay 3 with a new drive and format it (I just added bay 4 and formatted it). If I make some kind of dumb mistake and don't check the teeny tiny writing at the bottom to verify that the drive I am formatting is BAY 3, I will erase everything on another drive.

I don't recall ever looking at the info at the bottom of the DU page in determining which drive I need to format.  It should be obvious which drive needs formatting when you click on the Partition tab for a drive (not the volumes under the drive).  It will either be partitioned or not and have the volume names you recognize or not.

Anyway, don't i have to CLICK on the "computer drive name" to get to the partition tab? and doesn't that mean that I would have to click on all four of my drives since they are not listed in any order?

 

. . .

 

You follow?

No not really!

Click on the disk drives, the items that are not indented.  You will see the partition tab.  It should be obvious from the display which disk you have, i.e., by the names of the partiton volume(s) which are the names indented under their respective drives. 

Maybe it's too obvious to me but I really don't understand your problem here.  If you guessed the wrong drive simply click on another until you find the drive that needs partitioning/formatting.  You are trying to over analyze this.

For what its worth, I noticed the same thing.

Physical layout,

Bay 1 : Boot Drive

Bay 2 : RAID-1

Bay 3 : RAID-1

Bay 4 : Timemachine

That's how they're installed and how they are displayed in the system profiler, however in the disc utility one of the RAID slices is listed first, followed by the boot drive. Doubt it really means much of anything.

hotwheels 22 wrote:

 

i noticed in installing a fourth internal drive today that the drives are not listed in order, even though I do see a Bay listed at the bottom when i select on the drive. since the drives listed in Disk Utility show the manufacturer this can be a little confusing for me. Right now drives are listed from top to bottom as 3, 1, 2 4.

 

Is this an issue or is there a way to order them in the way they are in the computer 1 - 4?...

My 3 drives don't appear in bay sequence in Disk Utility either, and what's more, they don't  appear in the same sequence each time I run DU. So one solution is to give names to the partitions in each drive which are recognizably associated with the HD they're on. For example, my WD boot drive has the boot partition named Macintosh HD. My Seagate Barracuda XT from a GoFlex external has the boot partition backed up as "Macintosh HD S" and the other partitions on the Seagate drive all end with the S suffix. Names also recognizably differ on the third drive.

A second method of ID in DU is to right click on a partition of the HD of interest and choose Reveal in Finder so you can actually see it on your desktop. Of course, there's also the Connection ID: "Bay #" which shows when the HD is selected. With those methods of identification, it's unlikely you'll pick the wrong one.

One is somehow the drive and the ones under are somehow the read/writeable partitions or something?

The outdented items listed in DU are the physical drives themselves.  What's being shown is how the drive identifies itself to the system (I assume from some firmware on the drive's controller board inside the drive).  The indented names under the drive name are the volume names you created when you formatted and partitioned that particular drive.  So if you partition a physical drive with three volumes you will see three volume names (the ones you assigned to those partitions) listed under (indented) that drive. 

All I can say is name the volumes (partitions) anything you want that convenient to you.  I don't name my volumes as a function of what disk they are on or bay they are in.  I name them as a function of their intended use.  The only time I would care what bay the drive is in is when I would have to replace that drive should that ever happen (knock on wood, it hasn't).

...so, if i am following here I have to name the /volume/ when i partition the /drive/. and i see in re-reading that FatMac was using an "S" suffix to identify his MacIntosh HD Clone on the Seagate drive, if I am following him correctly.

 

I think I am doing basically the same thing here - for instance the fourth drive I just put in is named "1 TB drive 1 CLONE" - but with the exception that my /boot camp/ drives can't be named from what I was told? And that the "MacIntosh HD" is the default for my Snow Leopard partition is that right?...

You're following me correctly. The basic idea is to be able to use the name you've assigned to identify the particular partition for it's purpose and the physical hard disk that it's on by it's naming convention (e.g., "S" for the Seagate). Remember that they appear not only in Disk Utility but also on the desktop and if you have three clones of your Macintosh HD boot drive, there'll be four with that name on the desktop and you'll need to be able to tell which the actual boot partition is. So giving unique names helps to keep things straight. "Macintosh HD" is the default name Apple gives to the boot partition but you can change it to pretty much whatever you want. Now that 3 and 4TB hard disks are available, having four or more partitions on each physical Hard Disk is a real possibility, and with 4 bays on the Mac Pro, that's quite a bunch of partitions to keep track of. Consider also that you can carry this approach to any external drives you're using.

When you clone a partition, the original name gets carried over, but you can change that once the cloning is finished. Moreover, on the desktop, you can give colors to the label for each drive (actually partition) shown on the desktop, and if you give the same color to each partition on a particular hard disk, it's an additional aid to keeping things straight. BTW, you'll notice that if you clone a color-coded drive, the color will be carried over too, so you'd need to change it to the signature color of the hard disk.

I don't think you can mess with the boot camp partitions but I've never used them, preferring to virtuallize Windows and Linux using VMWare Fusion.