An interesting exercise…
John Surtees For my work, I run an old G4 800 Graphite mini tower and a similar G4 867 as a spare. Each with a couple of hard drives, plus a Lacie external for backup. All Hard Disks are partitioned into two volumes.
Last week I had the misfortune to have a major problem. I made the mistake of powering down my 800 when it was still doing a System Software update. Yes, I know, 'What was I thinking of'. I can see a certain Mr M Burrell shaking his head in disbelief. In my defence, I think it had stalled, it was taking forever.
On trying to restart – nothing, just a circle with an oblique stroke through it. Not even my external back-up would show. Usually, I do a back-up every Friday afternoon, using SuperDuper, but as work has been a bit light lately, I had left it for a fortnight.
So, I plugged the Lacie into the 867 back-up Mac and booted up. Although the Lacie didn't appear on the desktop, luckily 'Disk Utility' was able to see it and I was able to do a repair. Then writing my back-up volume to one of the spare volumes on the 867, I was then able to complete a job that was needed fairly quickly. Interesting point, all programs worked on the other machine OK. But QuarkExpress insisted on being re-registered with Quark or threatened to revert to demo mode. It was completely automatic and only took a minute.
In the middle of re-doing a horrible bit of work in Photoshop, the program crashed and would not open again. It was then that I remembered reading about repairing permissions. That done, it worked fine.
With the urgent work out of the way, it was time to get the 800 up and running again. How do you start a G4 800 when you can't get a System CD in the drive? Yep, the old paper clip trick. Not on a G4 Graphite you don't. The hole is covered by the casing. So open up the case, take out the CD drive, do the paper clip trick, put the drive back in with a Drive Genius CD disk in place, connect up the Lacie for good measure and boot. It booted from Drive Genius but not a single volume was recognised.
So, I took one of the Hard drives from the 876 and put it in the 800. Nothing. Then I remembered about master and slave drives. I was trying to boot with two masters. I replaced it with a slave from the 867 and it booted. What seems strange is that with the two slaves swapped, both machined now work fine, but I tried swapping them back to the original configuration and all the troubles returned.
The upside to this is, I now have two machines and an External HD with a full house of working software and I have learnt the following:
I now know that it is wise to back-up regularly, regardless of how little work I remember doing – When you have to do it again, it is a pain;
SuperDuper is worth many times the shareware price;
I now know to remove the External Hard Drive when doing a System Update, as it appears that System Update seems to effect all volumes not only the one it's updating;
If you like to get inside your Mac, the Haynes Mac Manual is worth every penny.
In doing the above, several questions occurred:
When using Disk Utility or other such software, I noticed that I could choose to repair not only individual partitions, but also a drive with multiple partitions. I wonder, does it do one partition at a time?
Is there a tool or easy way to remove Hard Drive jumpers?
How much would this have cost if I had gone to a professional?
Anybody got any views, thoughts, or advice on any of the above?