Cloning OS X Server to Mirrored Apple RAID: No Boot

[Anonymous]

Last September, I migrated our fileserver from AppleshareIP to OS X Server running on a Powermac G4/1.25GHz tower. I installed OS X Server on the Hitachi 80GB drive that came with the tower. Every night, I use Retrospect to backup the Shared Items folder so if the drive would die I can revert back to last night’s backup.

After running in that configuration for 5 months now, I want to move the data to a 2-drive mirrored RAID set in the same tower using Apple RAID as the software (I’ve never used RAID software before). So I purchased 2 Western Digital 80GB drives, installed them, and moved the original Hitachi drive to the other bay. Then I booted off an external firewire drive and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the Hitachi drive to the Western Digital RAID set. The cloning went fine, however when I changed the startup disk to boot off of the RAID set I get a symbol of a circle with a line through it — It can’t boot off the RAID set.

Then, as a test, I decided to clone something other than OS X Server to the RAID set. So I erased the RAID set and cloned a regular installation of Mac OS X onto the RAID. I changed the startup disk and the tower booted off of the RAID just fine.

Then, I erased the RAID, went back and cloned OS X Server to the RAID once again thinking perhaps the first time was a bad clone. This time it did the same thing…no booting off the RAID set when OS X Server was the data that was cloned. Weird!

In the past, I have successfully cloned OS X Server from the Hitachi to a Western Digital 120GB single drive with no booting problem.

Any thoughts on what could be the problem?

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

From memory you can only boot from Apple RAID arrays on *some* hardware (such as Xserve).

You can still achieve this, however, if you use SoftRAID (www.softraid.com), which allows you to boot from a mirror RAID array on most hardware (and supports 10.4.2). We use it and haven’t had any problems with it. You can even convert existing raid sets to SoftRAID without destroying them.

Another advantage gained from SoftRAID mirror volumes is what they call ‘mirror reads’, which will read from the mirrored drives like they were a stripe, giving a noticable improvement in read rates.

[jsafr]

I’m having a similar problem with an xServe. I’ve tried a couple different install and clone options but I can’t seem to get it to boot off the software RAID mirror unless I hold down the option key and select the mirrored volume as the startup drive. I originally installed it onto one of the two internal drives with no raid. Rebooted it several time during the software updates with no problem. I then used carbon copy cloner to copy the system to a clean external firewire drive doing a fix permissions before the clone. I then tested the clone by setting the startup disk to the new firewire drive and it booted fine. While booted to that new clone, I ran disk util and created the RAID mirror and cloned it back to the new RAID volume. That’s when it started not booting from the RAID. I just get the not permitted (no smoking circle / thingie) unless I hold down the option key and select it as the startup disk. Then all is well. I’ve run permission repairs after booting to the RAIDed system but still no luck. I just got done re-cloning it, booting the xserve in target disk mode, deleting the RAID mirror from my laptop booted with the clone, and then re-cloning to the new RAID mirror, but the same thing happens. Any ideas?

[Author]

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