Anyone booting iMac from WD MyBook Thunderbolt Striped Drive

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Level 1

45 points

Anyone booting iMac from WD MyBook Thunderbolt Striped Drive

Just bought a new Western Digital My Book 8TB Thunderbolt drive for my 27" iMac.

Plugged the drive in and it works great, right from the start, diags passed.

Problem is that when I boot the system into recovery mode even though I see all devices, and the RAID/STRIPE of the WD MyBook, I am having a problem trying to copy my current boot disk's data onto the new drive.

Things on the MyBook show up a little differently, but in Disk Utility if I select system partition under the 8TB RAID and select recover, and use the old system disk as the source, it thinks about it a bit, and then gives me the error message:

Restore Failure - An Error (32) occurred while copying. ( Broken pipe )

I've tried several times in different ways, but it always happens the same way.

Has anyone done this, and what do I need to do to book off this new Thunderbolt drive after copying all my data to it?

I'm running the latest OS with updates, and an Imac that I think was the first version to have Thunderbolt on it, a 27" screen with 16GB RAM.

The thing I am worried might be causing a problem is that I have other MyBooks, FireWire versions, attached to the system. I don't think this should make any difference really.

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), 24 inch

Posted on Sep 27, 2013 5:57 PM

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Answer 1

MartinR

Level 6

19,273 points

Oct 2, 2013 6:05 AM in response to bruxxx

Did you install OS X on your external WD drive? Or did you use a utility to clone your system HD to the external WD? If you cloned it, what did you use to create the clone on your external WD drive? If you cloned the drive, are you sure you also cloned the hidden OS X recovery partition?

Also, when you say "copy all my data" would you explain what you mean? Are you manually copying OS X system folders/files or just data folders/files? Keep in mind that in OS X and especially in Lion & Mt. Lion, key system folders are hidden and cannot be copied by normal means. You probably already know this, but merely copying files & folders will not result in a bootable drive.

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Answer 2

bruxxx Author

Level 1

45 points

Oct 2, 2013 1:56 PM in response to MartinR

Martin, yes, I actually had to install OSX on my external drive.

Normally I would boot from in recovery mode or from the installation media and copy the existing system disk, but for some reason ... I think it was that the WD MyBook is a RAID implementation, so the diskcopy failed.

I was able to download and run the install Mountain Lion and then reboot and recover from the internal boot drive ... it all went very well.

My other (2) Western Digital MyBooks appear to the system like one big disk drive and are easier to manage. The new Thunderbolt media has to be RAID'ed apparently ... perhaps having 2 x 4TB drives in it exceeded some limit in the OS.

The system does book ... although I have not booted from the recovery partition ... I can do that from the internal drive which is still partitioned as a boot partition.

With this question I was hoping to find out about the how and why of using ThunderBolt drives ... but I am amazed at the speed of this thing ... I might get an SSD and transfer the boot part of the drive, or reinstall the OS and make it even faster.

I think my problem had to do with the differences in my old MyBook devices and the new one that is seen as a RAID to the system.

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