Updating drive sleds in a G4 Xserve

Sep 14, '04 10:09:00AM

Contributed by: CptTripps

Astonished at the lack of drives available for the old G4 Xserves from Apple, I decided to tear one apart and see what the big deal was. It took 30 seconds to realize that we are dealing with a regular old Ultra-ATA drive! Apple is still getting $499 for the old drives, and if you can find one elsewhere, they are often "used."

Having eight Xserves, all with four 60GB drives in them, I went off to BestBuy and bought all 30 of the 250GB drives they had on sale for $125 each, went back to my data center, and started work on moving them over. Here comes the tip...

Usind an old hint that I found, I downloaded psync to start the transfer on one of the boot drives on a spare server. After psync did its thing, I then cracked open the Terminal to 'bless the new drive:'

$ bless -folder /System/Library/CoreServices
You DO NOT need to bless it for OS 9, as the Xserve won't boot into it. I put the new sled in, and presto ... all 35GB of data was over, and I had about 200GB free now. So for the cost of roughly six sleds, I was able to update all 30. I know most people don't have Xserves, or eight of them, but this is one of those hints I wish I'd have found six months ago.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040914092713710