10.4: Install Tiger on improperly set up RAID drive

May 04, '05 09:46:00AM

Contributed by: dcoyle

Tiger only hintThis is more like an un-hint. Previously, I had set up a mirrored RAID array per this hint. It all seemed to be working so well, until I tried installing Tiger. The Tiger installer had major issues when attempting to verify the installation disk (my RAID drive). Although well-warned, I did not have a backup (who needs one with a RAID 0 array?).

The fix is pretty straightforward, but somewhat tedious. After the Tiger installer lets you know that everything is hosed, power down the computer. One at a time, disconnect one of the drives and attempt to boot off the still-connected drive. In my case, one drive would boot and was shown in Disk Utility as a "degraded" RAID drive. The other drive would not boot at all.

Pay very close attention to which one is the "good" drive. Confusingly, Disk Utility shows the unbootable drive as the drive in the RAID set and the bootable drive as on a separate volume. The only information that seemed to make sense was the disk location info which tells you whether the drive is in the upper or lower bay.

Once you are satisfied that you know which disk is which, erase the unbootable disk. Then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your "degraded RAID disk" to your newly initialized disk. When that is done, boot up on the newly cloned disk, delete the RAID set, then clone back. In my case, just to be sure, I first verified I could boot off the newly created disk, then I unplugged my newly initialized-and-cloned disk, and booted off the Tiger install disk. From there, I deleted the RAID set and re-initialized the drive.

There's some morals here, I'm sure. In my case, I plan to pay better attention to the numerous warnings about attempting unsupported hacks.

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