Moving boot disk to raid 0

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Level 1

30 points

Moving boot disk to raid 0

Hi Guys,

I have the following volumes on my MacPro

1. Boot Disk - 465.3 GB, 200GB used
2. Raid 0 volume - 436.2 GB

How easy is it for me to move the boot disk data to the raid 0 volume and then boot from the raid 0 partition.

Also I have heard that if you have a raid 0 boot disk that the firmware updates can fail, is this still true.

Thanks for any help

Andy

Posted on May 6, 2007 10:59 PM

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Answer 1

AndrewCapon Author

Level 1

30 points

May 7, 2007 2:16 AM in response to AndrewCapon

Hi Guys,

I don't know if this is the best way of doing it but this is what I did:

1. Booted from installation disk

2. Installed osx onto raid 0

3. Told the installation to copy everything across from the old partition.

It all seems to have gone ok, I have removed the original boot disk and started testing.

The whole machine seems so much faster now 🙂

Cheers

Andy

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Answer 2

May 7, 2007 1:02 PM in response to AndrewCapon

The simplest is to use a cloning tool like SuperDuper!…

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/

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Answer 3

AndrewCapon Author

Level 1

30 points

May 7, 2007 1:19 PM in response to infinite vortex

Hi Ned,

Thanks for the info.

The one problem I have got is that a load of plists still contain references to the original disk rather than the new volume.

Do you know of a quick way to do a search and replace on all plist files to change the volume name?

Cheers

Andy

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Answer 4

May 7, 2007 1:39 PM in response to AndrewCapon

Unless you're doing something "non-standard" there should be no reason why any reference won't continue to work after a clone on the new drive. References are based on the root mount point "/" which relates to the root of the boot drive so regardless of the boot drive the references will remain to work.

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Answer 5

AndrewCapon Author

Level 1

30 points

May 7, 2007 2:11 PM in response to infinite vortex

Hi Ned,

Unfortunately some companies, Native instruments being one hard code the volume into their setup files which is really annoying.

Is there any way of getting spotlight or finder to search for all plist files containing a certain string? It doesn't seem to work for me is it because they are system files or something?

Cheers

Andy

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Answer 6

May 7, 2007 2:20 PM in response to AndrewCapon

Well… Native are in a very small minority. So why don't you just delete the plists and reinstall the software which will result in new plists.

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Answer 7

The hatter

Level 9

60,980 points

May 7, 2007 2:43 PM in response to infinite vortex

Quicken Data files are actually packages, which can contain alias to the volume. Once I stripped the aliases from the data file, no problems, but for the longest time (years) everytime I cloned and used a different volume I'd run into trouble.

LittleSnitch hard codes the volume name, but also WHERE on the volume, an application is located. Very annoying.

So it may be plist or preference, but it could also be writing an alias to data file, or even back to the application package itself.

You would think at some point during testing especially, a light bulb would go off and realize there is a better way to code (unless it really is deliberate and trying to tie a program to only a single volume type system, which the Mac doesn't need to be).

Feedback the vendor. However, unless you do a lot of moving stuff around (like during testing) it is a "once only" event. If you name the new RAID boot volume with same name, might not even matter.

I do a lot of backup and restores during the course of a week, SuperDuper works well, not 200% perfect maybe, but works.

I keep my boot volume, though, free of my home account. That resides on another volume and can last for years. The boot volume gets changed more often. And I think having "home account" (but not /Users) not be on the boot drive makes it easy and avoids some of these problems even.

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Answer 8

AndrewCapon Author

Level 1

30 points

May 7, 2007 2:47 PM in response to infinite vortex

Hi Ned,

Re-installing will take a long time (around 17 applications) and could end in disaster as I would have to re-authorise them all, there is a good possibility that the software may be disabled as they are not running on the disk they where originally installed on. The Native Instruments protection scheme is an absolute minefield, recently I updated one of the applications and it took two weeks to get it to run again with many support calls to NI.

If you fancy a laugh goto the NI forums and search for "Service Center" you will not believe what you read some people loose their software for months!

Cheers

Andy

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Answer 9

The hatter

Level 9

60,980 points

May 7, 2007 2:57 PM in response to AndrewCapon

And you are having these problems after using SuperDuper to clone a drive? they should work. One thing to do is make the backup, then use something else to import or migration assistant or merge back to the fresh system.

The first thing I did with Carbon Copy Cloner 4 yrs ago was to clone a system, then clone the clone, and see if everything worked (it did).

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Answer 10

May 21, 2007 7:05 PM in response to infinite vortex

I moved my boot disk to a RAID using "Restore" in Disk Utility. If you prefer the command line, use "asr". Either will clone an existing volume. These are built-in tools that are part of OS X.

I actually started by making the new disk a single-disk "degraded RAID pair" using "diskutil enableRAID", cloned the old disk to the new, booted from the new disk and then added the old disk in as a mirror stripe using "diskutil addToRAID".

iMac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

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