Possible to convert a mirrored RAID boot drive to a single disc boot drive

hi ... i made the mistake of installing my Macpro with a RAID on the first two drive bays as a startup disc. Although this doesn't pose any problems per se i would like to have a single disc startup drive now but i do not have the time or courage to re-install and re-configure everything (installation&config with all software takes 3 days due to the huge number of software i have on this machine).
is it possible (and how) to get rid of the RAID and convert one of the discs to a normal startup volume so i can reformat the second disc and use it as a work drive ? Since the 'mirrored' drives both contaion a full startup drive this should be possible i think but could not find any info on this.
thx for any help with this ...

hey .. funny how expert opinions vary ... i have a handfull of IT and software RAID experts who disagree with you ... in my case, i'd rather get rid of it ... ( however i still have to find a solution to clone my boot drive that works flawlessly with all my software ... )
anyways ... how exactly do i go about splitting the RAID, to make sure i don't mess it up ....
1. restart from CD
2. Delete the mirrored RAID set
3. remove one of the HDs with the raid slice on it (i'll keep it as a backup 4 the moment just in case)
4. restart from the remaining slice disc
5. ... ?
do i need to do anything specific ... ? what about the name of the Volume .. for the moment my startup disk (the RAID) is called 'BootRAID' ... the slices are called 'RAID Slice (disk0s2)' and 'RAID Slice (disk1s2)' .. in order for everything to work properly, don't i have to rename the new startup disk ?
i'm scared ...
here's a screenshot of my setup: http://kinkajou.net/diskUtility_RAID.jpg
<Edited by Moderator>

Similar Messages

No disc in the drive. Please install disc into drive E.

I have contacted your customer tech service via chat. They worked with me for three hours today and passed me off to the forums because they couldn't speak English and couldn't figure out the answer to my problem, even after taking control of my computer.
What my problem is, is that I just bought both photoshop and Premiere elements 13. Photoshop seems to work fine.
When I click on Premiere Elements 13 I get an error box that reads: There is no disc in the drive. Please insert disc into drive E.
Adobe chat support seemed to think it was enough that the program was installed correctly. They couldn't figure out how to get rid of the dang error box that disappears after 7 to 10 clicks anywhere on the box. This error box pops up when I enter the program or leave it. Its appearance every time I use the program or leave the program is annoying and unacceptable as we will be opening and closing the program constantly.
I have completely taken off my antivirus program so it wouldn't be a factor in this. I have reinstalled the program about ten times literally, including one tedious download from your website. The error message still continues to pop up.
I am running Windows 8 on a brand new computer. 16 GB RAM with 64 bit processor.
Hope you can help because I am very annoyed after six hours of this irritation.

Sorry I meant that I have a 64 bit operating system and the processor is Intel Core i7-337CPU @3.40GHz 3.90Ghz

Possibly boneheaded question re mirrored raid

Hi, if half of a mirrored raid set up with disk utility fails does the volume stay mounted and usable? Or is there still some sort of recovery necessary?
I'm thinking yes that's the point but I thought I'd better ask.
Thanks,
Dave

Both drives should be on independent bus or using a controller. The MDD has two buses, but ATA/66 and ATA/100 differ by 4% and enough difference to not recommend using two drives in any form of stripped or mirrored RAID.
Two drives on same bus, master/slave I would avoid as the bus has to wait for one drive for I/O before it can talk to the second drive.
With an SATA no such problem or limitation, or using an ATA controller with two independent channels.

What's the best way to upgrade a mirrored RAID drive?

I have two 3TB Firewire 800 drives which are almost full which I'd like to upgrade. The drives are configured as striped drives using the Apple (OS-X) RAID utility in disk utility. Is it possible to configure three drives as RAID 5, or four drives as RAID 10, or am I better off just going for a couple of larger drives and staying with the striped configuration? The drive is mainly used for an iTunes library, iMovie content and Aperture vaults so speed isn't that critical.
Thanks in advance

You can convert to a striped RAID but not without erasing the drives. The only ways to make a larger mirrored RAID are:
Buy two more identical drives. Make two sets of Striped RAIDs which in turn can be configured into one mirrored RAID by mirroring the two striped RAIDs.
Buy two larger drives, configure as a mirrored RAID, copy the data from the old RAID to the new one, or have two mirrored RAIDs.
Regardless of what you do you may end up erasing the data from the present setup if it involves breaking the RAID. If you break a mirrored RAID the data on each drive will remain intact until you re-use the drives in some other manner such as converting the mirrored RAID to a striped RAID.

How to separate drives in a mirrored RAID without losing contents?

Perhaps senseless questions (non-issues), I'm not sure. Better to ask than to regret a stupid move ...
I have an external mirrored RAID array (running 10.4.11) which is generally my startup volume(s) for a G4 Mini. Obviously, I can also boot from the internal drive.
1. What happens if I disconnect them from each other (firewire cable) ? Is the drive that remains connected to the CPU still accessible?
2. If I (somehow?) "Undo" the mirrored RAID set, is data on either or both drives lost or do the contents remain intact and accessible?
3. If drive contents remain intact and accessible, then how does one "undo" a RAID set" ? Disk Utility "Help" and several forum searches have not been helpful (void of all pertinent content).
My apologies if these are "stupid" questions and thanks in advance for informed responses.

thanks - nice to know
However - when I open DU, select this raid set, choose the RAID tab, I see NO option of "delete" - only "erase" button. Perhaps I need to (re)start from a different drive.
IMO neither one of those terms is exactly intuitive for uncoupling a mirrored set. I do not want to delete or erase anything, just uncouple them so they are once again independent drives (without loss of content). BTW, since I typically boot (start) from the current set, I presume that either drive (once decoupled) will also be boot-able with preferences etc. persevered!

Fan Speeds, and Mirror Raid with New Internal Hard Drive

Regards,
I recently installed and formatted a new hard drive in my PowerMac dual 2.3 ghz computer and I have a few questions.
1. Now that there are two hard drives do I need to do anything to ensure that the fan on my computer can keep them cool? I think the fans I have in the hard drive bay is enough, but I do not know if they will automatically set themselves to run properly. I can monitor the fan speeds and temp from iStat pro, but do not remember what level the temperature was before installing the new one.
2. Given that my new drive is a SeaDisc hard drive and the older one is a Western Digital, will this cause any problems in creating a mirrored RAID. I believe that both are 7200rpm drives, and my second hard drive is a little larger (I will just have unused space after making the RAID). I am concerned with the fact that these two drives are from two different manufactures. Will this cause problems or drastically slow down the reading and writing of data? Has anyone else experienced problems in making a mirrored RAID from two hard drives that are not exact matches, and even come from different manufacturers?
Any advice will help.
Thanks
earpshmael

Hi earpshmael;
Generally when creating RAID arrays the more similar the drive the less problems you tend to have.
The real question is exactly why do you want or need RAID?
I think so many people seem to think that RAID will solve all of their problem. I hate to tell you the bad news but it will not.
Generally there are to varieties of RAID available using the software RAID built into OS X which are 0 and 1. RAID 0 or stripling is generally for moving large file rapidly for applications like HD video. It usually doesn't help the OS. RAID 1 or mirroring is for protection from drive failure. It is not a valid backup solution.
Allan

Offline Disc In Degraded Mirrored RAID Set

I have a 2 disc (300GB each) mirrored RAID set that has worked fine up until recently. One slice appeared failed so I attempted to rebuild it. 7 hours later it still showed up as failed. I attempted a rebuild once more and the same result. I then shut everything down and re-booted my whole system. Now the RAID set is still degraded but the slice now shows up as offline as opposed to failed.
I checked the connections and it's all connected fine.
I have run First Aid several times and no repairs were necessary.
Anyway I can get this back 'online'?
If not, can I delete it, repair it and if it's repaired add it back to the RAID set?

It sounds like one of the drives in the mirrored set has lost its mind (i.e., failed).
This is exactly the situation Mirrored RAID is good for.
Remove the failed drive, insert your spare drive of the same or larger size, and assign it as a spare. Then you should be able to get the RAID to rebuild onto the spare and bring it up to date in the next half-a-day or so. Then the mirror will show as working again.
Make sure your Backup is up-to-date. A second failure now (before the array has rebuilt) will give you data loss.

Mirrored raid in early 2009 Mac Pro

I have created a mirrored RAID on Two 1 TB Hitachi internal hard drives in my Mac Pro running 10.8.4. I have put all of my working Photoshop files that used to reside on the desktop of my boot drive onto the RAID where they will stay until there is enough to move to them 1 TB backup drives that will be stored away.
Here's my question: This is the first RAID I have created in Dick Utility. The two hard drives show up on my desktop as one drive icon. Is this correct? Disk Utlity said that the RAID was successful, but how do I know the files I put on there have really been mirrored? I am attaching a screen grab of Disk Utility. Thanks.

Open Disk Utility and select ONLY the pseudo-physical Volume that is the RAID. In your case this looks to be "999.86 GB fotografia-LA Working Files RAID".
You will get a display similar to this one, which will give you a warm fuzzy feeling that all is well:
If either of the drives encounters a serious Error, the status changes to "Degraded".
Then the RAID must be rebuilt. One of the drives may have dropped out of the set, but occasionally it does not -- the set is degraded but both drives are still part of the set.
If you find yourself doing this rebuilding more than once or twice, Do not ignore such a call for help. It means a drive needs to be replaced with a new drive, not just rebuild the RAID again. When I had this happen to me, the errant drive needed twenty Bad Blocks spared out -- more than Disk Utility will do in one pass. It really needed to be removed from the RAID and set aside.

Does FireWire 800 see individual drives in a four bay hard drive enclosure?

I am trying to find a four bay hard drive enclosure with FireWire 800 interface, AND through this one FW800 connection my OS can see the four hard drives individually (similar to USB interface or Port Multiplier on eSATA interface). Anyone knows whether such a product exists? Thanks.

I'm not sure you fully understand how the hardware/software RAID system functions. If you create a mirrored RAID with either then you have redundancy for drive failure. This would be the case for either hardware or software arrays. If you create a striped array with hardware or software then there is no redundancy regardless of which method you use.
An enclosure failure can occur whether you use software or hardware based arrays, so the failure risks are the same. There's no reason to believe that the failure risk of the enclosure would be greater than using software. In fact it's likely that the hardware would be more reliable. As for differences between eSATA and Firewire reliability I'm not sure why your would believe one is more reliable than the other unless you have data that supports such a conclusion.
If you are overly cautious about backups (which is a good thing) then I would look for an enclosure in which you could have two separate striped arrays. Then the two striped arrays are configured into a single mirrored array. That way you have two separate backups - a main one and the mirror. This gives both drive and data redundancy. The main risk is if one drive in each array fails simultaneously. The risk of this would be fairly low I would think. Even this risk can be removed if the box supports other types of arrays than just 0, 1, and 0-1. See the following:
RAID Basics
For basic definitions and discussion of what a RAID is and the different types of RAIDs see RAIDs. Additional discussions plus advantages and disadvantages of RAIDs and different RAID arrays see:
RAID Tutorial;
RAID Array and Server: Hardware and Service Comparison>.
Hardware or Software RAID?
RAID Hardware Vs RAID Software - What is your best option?
RAID is a method of combining multiple disk drives into a single entity in order to improve the overall performance and reliability of your system. The different options for combining the disks are referred to as RAID levels. There are several different levels of RAID available depending on the needs of your system. One of the options available to you is whether you should use a Hardware RAID solution or a Software RAID solution.
RAID Hardware is always a disk controller to which you can cable up the disk drives. RAID Software is a set of kernel modules coupled together with management utilities that implement RAID in Software and require no additional hardware.
Pros and cons
Software RAID is more flexible than Hardware RAID. Software RAID is also considerably less expensive. On the other hand, a Software RAID system requires more CPU cycles and power to run well than a comparable Hardware RAID System. Also, because Software RAID operates on a partition by partition basis where a number of individual disk partitions are grouped together as opposed to Hardware RAID systems which generally group together entire disk drives, Software RAID tends be slightly more complicated to run. This is because it has more available configurations and options. An added benefit to the slightly more expensive Hardware RAID solution is that many Hardware RAID systems incorporate features that are specialized for optimizing the performance of your system.
For more detailed information on the differences between Software RAID and Hardware RAID you may want to read: Hardware RAID vs. Software RAID: Which Implementation is Best for my Application?

PSE13 on Win 8: repeated popup error "no disc in drive"

I have photoshop elements 13 and it installed fine. It even works fine but I get this popup every time I open an close the program that says: No disc in drive. Please install disc into drive E. This is frustrating since I am in and out of the program all the time. I have to click the error message seven to ten times before it will go away and each click it makes an irritating ding sound that woke my wife up the other night. Upon closing the program the same message pops up and I have to click on it four to six times before it will go away.
How do I fix this problem?
I have reinstalled the program literally ten times. One of which was straight from the Adobe website - per Adobe chat support. Adobe chat support was not able to fix my problem, even after taking control of my pc and sent me to forums.
I also have disconnected all external hard drives and took antivirus off my pc so it wouldn't be a factor.
I don't know what else to do but am finding this really annoying to the point that I don't want the program on my pc anymore if it can't be fixed.
I am running Windows 8, 64 bit, have 16 GB RAM, and have Intel Core i7-3770 CPU 3.40 GHz 3.90GHz on a brand new computer.
Thank

Its a known problem:
this is posted somewhere else by A.T. Romano:
quote:
The Premiere Elements 13 No Disc error is a known issue which has afflicted many. PRE_help's fix for this has
worked for many. It involves deleting or disabling the OldFilm.AEX file found
Local Disk C
Program Files
Adobe
Adobe Premiere Elements 13
Plug-ins
Common
NewBlue
and in the NewBlue Folder should be the OldFilm.AEX file that you delete or disable by renaming the file from OldFilm.AEX to OldFilm.AEXOLD.
Please let us know if that worked for you.
Thank you.
ATR
end quote
just follow and its fixed. (i had the same problem and now no more.)

Can a boot disk be converted to a raid mirror without reformatting?

Today the the original 250Gb SATA drive in my G5 started making some awful clicking sounds and seems beyond recovery. Backups are about 2 weeks old, not too bad.
I replaced that with a new 300 Gb drive and reinstalled everything. I'm thinking of adding a second 300 Gb driver and mirroring everything.
Can I simply add the new drive and create a RAID mirror, or do I need to reinstall everything after creating the mirror? I wasn't able to find anything that mentioned that process.
Thanks,
Michael
PowerMac G5 Dual 2.0 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Problem with mirrors is it instantly copies everything that's written to the first drive and people have had problems booting from a mirror.
What you need instead is to auto-clone your boot drive occasionally and make daily auto-backups of certain folders.
This way not only do you have a hardware protection, but software protection as well. You can go back to a previous OS version if you need too, you can boot from the clone if you need to, even reverse clone.
So you have more flexability, mirroring is good for one time data captures that a hardware failure is not a option.
A great piece of software clone/backup is Deja Vu
Read how to do this and more text file here

Possible to boot B&W G3 from mirrored RAID??

Hi all,
I've tried to get my B&W, running server 10.3.9, to boot from a mirrored RAID (RAID 1). So far, I can successfully create the RAID, run the software installer, and choose the RAID with Startup Disk, but upon restart, it doesn't recognize a valid system (flashing system folder/question mark).
There's a tech article that states the B&W G3 won't boot from a striped RAID (RAID 0), but I've not been able to find anything definitive regarding mirrored RAID. Does anyone know for sure (or know where I can find documentation)?
TIA,
Brad
B&W G3 Mac OS X (10.3.9) 10.3.9 server

Thanks for the info. I had no problem either creating the RAID (successfully in both Disk Utility and Terminal), installing the OS, or selecting the RAID pair as the startup disk. I'm doing this with ATA disks.
Once done, though, the system won't boot from the RAID pair. I know that the B&W open firmware won't allow startup from striped RAID (technical article http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58258 applies), but don't know if this applies to mirrored RAID as well.
Has anyone out there successfully booted a B&W G3 from a RAID 1 configuration?

Mirror raid array -hard drive replacement specs

What drive spec to I used to select the replacement hard drive? My current drive is not easy to find. Now using a samsung spinpoint sp25045c.

I have had similar problems in the past with Snow Leopard. I can list some command line instructions to do it manually.
sudo diskutil appleRAID repairMirror /Volumes/nameofvolume /dev/disk2
The above will try and repair the RAID mirror by adding /dev/disk2 (or whatever number your new disk is). If it is the boot drive you are repairing and it is called ServerHD then it would be /Volumes/ServerHD
If the repair will not work then the next thing to try is to change the original drive back to a non-RAID volume by doing the following
sudo diskutil appleRAID delete /Volumes/nameofvolume
then you can convert it back to a RAID again via the command line. There is probably more than one way to do this but the following is definitely a non-destructive method that can be done while actually running from the original drive.
sudo diskutil appleRAID enable mirror /dev/disk1
(where the number is the original drive)
sudo diskutil appleRAID add member /dev/disk2 /Volumes/nameofvolume
(where the number is the new replacement drive)
sudo diskutil appleRAID update AutoRebuild 1 /Volumes/nameofvolume
It would be a good idea to read the Unix man page before trying this
man diskutil

How to recover data from failed drive that's part of mirrored raid

Hi Guys,
hope to get help from someone knowledgeable out there. I have a macpro and recently experienced a failed drive. I set up that failed drive as part of a mirrored raid, this set is not my primary drive and so my computer is stilling up and running but now am wondering how I access the data from the mirrored drive. Should the mirrored drive automatically mount on my desktop whereby I would be able to access the files? This is my first drive failure and I was under the impression having a mirror would duplicate my data and allow me to access it in situations like this. I'm a bit of novice in this area and not sure if the data is truly on the "mirror" or if there are things I need to do.
I launched disk utility and was able to see the mirrored drive and I selected "mount" drive but it would not mount; I then selected "verify" and got "unrecognizeable filesystem" Is this normal? Am I suppose do something to get access to the mirrored drive? Do I install a new drive in place of the failed drive and expect the raid to rebuild automatically whereby I then see the data?
Your help is much appreciated.

Even with a mirror, you still need a backup.
Along with Disk Utility, you still need 3rd party (TechTool Pro 5, Disk Warrior 4.1.1+).
And if you like to use RAID and esp mirror RAID, consider
http://www.softraid.com which is a step above (the pdf guide, manual you can download and they have a demo, so worth the read). SoftRAID can also import/convert an Apple RAID to its own format which has been known to recover drives and data.

Maximum drive size for mirrored RAID

I'm want to set up a mirrored RAID with two 4TB drives that I have. When I put the drives in the tower (Mac Pro, OS 10.8.5) and open Disk Utility, the RAID button at the top does not show up for these drives. I only see First Aid, Erase, and Restore. Is there a max size for a drive that I'm exceeding? Or is it something else?

Hi - from the research I have done, there is a BUG in the OS. A solution is to boot with an older version of OS X and format the drive with the version of disk utlity on the older OS, or yank out the drive and put it in one of those 'drive toaster' type devices and format it EXTERNALLY. The problem seems to be localized when it's formatted with the drive INSIDE the MacPro.
You would figure that this would be a high priority fix, but NO. I went nuts for a few days trying to figure out WHY I could not see the RAID tab.
There is also third party software that has a more robust RAID solution. I have NOT tried it yet, but you should check it out.
http://www.softraid.com/
Alfred
PS: If you've resolved this problem, do share your findings here too!

Possible to convert a mirrored RAID boot drive to a single disc boot drive

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