Q: How to backup, reformat and restore boot drive?

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14 points

Q: How to backup, reformat and restore boot drive?

Bear with me, I am not a seasoned Mac person - I learned on PC's - any notion of reformating my boot drive makes me very anxious. Computer: Mac Pro (2008 vintage) running Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, 6GB RAM, 4 internal HD's (320GB, 1, 2 and 3TB).

Symptoms: Mac Pro starts with the horizontal "thermometer" bar across the bottom of the screen. It takes 10 minutes or so to boot, then starts over one more time, or several times more, but eventually boots up. I ran the disk utility repair from the install disk and it says HD is corrupt and needs to be reformatted, "incorrect..thread count" message in red seems to be the killer.

Plan: 1) back up boot drive to other internal drive using Time Machine, 2) reformat boot drive (320GB original drive), 3) restore boot drive.

I'm currently running Time Machine and doing a backup of the boot drive. Once that is complete I want to reformat that drive, which hopefully will repair it, and then restore it AS WAS. I understand from reading other posts that Time Machine does it all: after refromatting, install the Mountain Lion install disk, run Utilities, and simply do a restore. I haven't been through all of the steps, obviously, so I'm anxious. Does this really work? What else should I do in preparation for this process? I'm not prepared to go and spend money on stuff I don't need. If the disk doesn't repair, I plan on using one of the oher internal HD's, but they all have a bunch of files on them.

If necessary, can I do a restore to one of those HD's without losing any files exisiting on them?

Perhaps it it is recommended to use one of the other internal HD's as the boot drive anyway?

Whats' the best plan forward that might be different from what I plan?

I appreciate the helpful reponses, however, I have read some responses from folks who obviously know everything there is to know about Mac's and I sometimes I understand, but sometimes I have a vague idea what they are talking about.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Dual 2.8GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon

Posted on Jan 26, 2014 1:41 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

DBLewis Author

Level 1

14 points

Jan 26, 2014 1:44 PM in response to DBLewis

Correction: using Snow Leopard, not Mountain Lion as stated; should be "install Snow Leopard repair disk.."

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Answer 2

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Jan 26, 2014 2:09 PM in response to DBLewis

leave your drive as is and start fresh and format a new drive - pulls yours

And if you are going to use 10.6 DVD then best if you don't have ATI 5770

I would use CCC carbon copy cloner to also do a backup in addition to T.M. but with "use checksum for all file copied" to insure their integrity. And CCC makes bootable clone of the system.

I would also if you are not already move all the media files, data and their libraries, your "home folder" off to a non-system data drive as well.

Probably I am going to ask you to understand more but the end result is a good way forward toward having a working sytem, redundant backup sets, not just one, and never have to worry again as long as you have system restores already and spare clones of a working system.

But leave the drive as is. You can use Setup or Migration Assistant and after making sure you have a good sytem that owrks, AND made a backup clone of it as well, then zero it out and reformat it and use it as an extra but not primary backup device.

Clone your system:

How to Clone a Volume
Using Cloning as a Backup Strategy

See also Erasing a Drive, How and Why to Partition a Drive, RAID .

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7032/carbon-copy-cloner

Lion or above you would have a Recovery Partition to work from, but even there it is beneficial to have even that created on another system drive as well so you can swap out systems in a minute with Restart and reset the Startup Disk control panel adn be on your way.

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Answer 3

Jan 26, 2014 2:38 PM in response to DBLewis

I ran the disk utility repair from the install disk and it says HD is corrupt and needs to be reformatted

It should say that the drive is corrupt and unusable. Instead, the language they chose (a long time ago) makes you focus on reformatting, as if the DRIVE were the prize. Clearly your DATA are the prize, and today, drives are really cheap by historical standards.

You should start over with a new drive. Install a fresh copy of Mac OS X on it. Then focus on salvaging your data. Only when you are satisfied with that, try to salvage the drive, if possible.

There is a very approachable web site devoted to Time Macine, written by the late James Pond:

Apple OSX and Time Machine Tips

.

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Answer 4

DBLewis Author

Level 1

14 points

Jan 28, 2014 2:37 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks for the responses and getting me on the right track.

"leave your drive as is and start fresh and format a new drive - pulls yours"

OK, not sure what "pulls yours means" but I would like to use the drive that I made the Time Machine copy to as my new boot drive. I obviously don't want to reformat it; can I just use Utilities or some such thing to do this?

And I'm not sure what this means:

"And if you are going to use 10.6 DVD then best if you don't have ATI 5770"

Looking forward...

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Answer 5

Jan 28, 2014 2:45 PM in response to DBLewis

Time Machine drives store data in an extremely compact form. They are not bootable, and using you Backup as your Main Drive leaves you "working without a net" with no Backup.

You need a new drive. Luckily, they are not expensive.

.

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Answer 6

DBLewis Author

Level 1

14 points

Jan 28, 2014 2:59 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I've got four internal HD's including the "bad" one. Lets assume I get a new drive, or I clean one of the ones I have in prep to become the boot drive. How do I make a new boot drive and then get the TM info onto that drive?

Thanks.

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Answer 7

Jan 28, 2014 4:01 PM in response to DBLewis

Erase a drive (new or used). My preference when re-purposing a drive is to take the time (several hours) to security Erase, write Zeroes, one pass -- but this is just a personal preference. This assures every block on the drive is good, and there will be no surprises.

Install Mac OS X from whatever sources you have available such a s a 10.6 DVD or a download of a later version.

Use this article to restore everything EXCEPT Mac OS X from your Time Machine backups:

Setting-up a new Mac from an old one, its Backups, or a PC

Run software Update repeatedly until no more updates are avaiable.

.

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Answer 8

DBLewis Author

Level 1

14 points

Jan 28, 2014 7:19 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I'll use the Snow Leopard 10.6 DVD to load OSX. I assume that I can do a second copy from the DVD (since I've already done one).

Is this Security Erase, Zeroes, etc. thing obvious on how to do it? And I read the linked article, and I assume that when I do the TM copy that OSX will prompt me for what I want to copy or not copy? (I just don't want to get halfway into this damnedable process and find out I don't know *** I'm doing.)

Thanks for the support. It's great learning about this stuff, but it's my wife's Mac, and if I mess it up I might as well move out for several months, and then into the garage for a year or so until things cool down.

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Answer 9

DBLewis Author

Level 1

14 points

Feb 9, 2014 5:32 PM in response to DBLewis

Did all of the above and I believe that I am running off of my new boot disk except for the following issues:

1) iPhoto photos cannot be seen in iPhoto; the thumbnails are there but when I click on them the screen is black; the photo files are on another disk;

2) to make sure that my new boot disk was running independently from the old boot disk I tried to eject the original "Macintosh HD" and it said that it could not be ejected because it was being used by a program;

3) Is there a way to make sure that the new boot disk is working correctly?

4) When booting, how does the machine know to go to the new boot disk rather than the old one?

5) When I was finished with the process I got a message saying that the "Macintosh HD" could not be repaired, etc. What does that mean? How does it know that?

DL

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Answer 10

DBLewis Author

Level 1

14 points

Feb 9, 2014 6:20 PM in response to DBLewis

Final Cut Pro won't load, either. This is not good. Do I need to reinstall it and then go and find all of the media files?

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Answer 11

Feb 9, 2014 6:36 PM in response to DBLewis

4) When booting, how does the machine know to go to the new boot disk rather than the old one?

The boot drive is the one specified in:

System Preferences > Startup Disk

The process of installing sets the newly-installed on drive as the new Startup Drive. Also, if the drives ahev unique names, the Starup disk Will be shown by name in the first pane of:

 menu > About this Mac

Holding the Alt/Option key at Startup and selecting a different drive is a One-time Option -- the default Startup disk is not changed.

------

5) When I was finished with the process I got a message saying that the "Macintosh HD" could not be repaired, etc. What does that mean? How does it know that?

Disk Utility (Repair Disk) does an integrity check on a Drive's Directory data structures. Simple problems can be fixed. More complex problems can not be fixed, and the drive needs be re-evaluated to see if it can continue to be used for anything.

What was the exact message [Or run the (Repair Disk) again and note the messages].

To change the Finder-name for a drive (to help maintain your sanity) select the drive Icon, Get-Info on it, and type a new name for it. Done.

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Answer 12

DBLewis Author

Level 1

14 points

Feb 10, 2014 8:25 PM in response to DBLewis

OK, thanks; got that.

Afterthoughts: the OSX disk install of Snow Leopard and Time Machine restore was fraught with problems. Final Cut Studio wouldn't load, iPhotos were not being found, iTunes had a big cross through the dock icon...not very comforting, and I didn't feel like messing with all of the applications for the next three weeks, so...

So I zeroed out that Boot drive again, and Carbon Copy Cloned my original boot drive (Macintosh HD) to the new boot drive. I would like to leave it like this since everything seems to be working well.

Questions: Is that all I need to do? Is OSX happy? Any potential problems with doing this?

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Answer 13

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Feb 11, 2014 3:37 AM in response to DBLewis

CCC has been around for over 12 yrs, it works. You should clone your good system too now while you have it and put a copy somewhere safe.

you can trim down the system boot drive to just the OS and apps, and relocate if you have not already all your media files and libraries to other drives.

Don't rely on just TM for backups.

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Answer 14

DBLewis Author

Level 1

14 points

Feb 17, 2014 5:59 PM in response to The hatter

I have run through and implemented all of the above and the system was working fine for about 2 days and now again has started shutting down. The screen goes to some HTML type language image and message says, you need to shut down and start up again. This will happen about 5 times, then the sytem eventually runs. Any further suggestions as to what is going on????

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Answer 15

Feb 17, 2014 7:04 PM in response to DBLewis

That is likely to be a kernel panic. Those are stored in a log and can be read out. You can even post one here for analysis. Use this article for how to get them:

MacOS X: How to Log a kernel panic

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