Boot Drive no longer at top?

This is something I've never seen before and am not sure exactly where to post.
I did two new things for my G5 Tower of PowerMac (dual 2ghz) this week.
I put in a new 750GB Western Digital Caviar SATA drive in the top bay and installed 10.5 as a clean install. After the clean install, I used Migration Assist. to pull the data from the other internal SATA (bottom bay). Things went pretty well with a few bumps, but nothing that a couple of updates and restarts didn't cure. The only thing that's weird is that the new drive, which is now my boot drive, will not drop at the top. It won't even drop second in line. :-\
For the longest time, I thought it wasn't even booting off the drive and that there were jumper issues or something. It wasn't until I looked closely (both drives had nearly identical systems on them since I wanted to move it to the larger drive) that I realized it actually was booted off of the drive, just didn't drop at the top. All other drives, external and internal can be dismounted just fine, but I'm puzzled as to why this is happening. I searched here and couldn't find reference to it anywhere, but these boards have some of the savviest people I've read.
Has anyone ever seen this and how did you correct it?
Very much obliged,
Mick

Didn't get any feedback on this, but I believe it was related to the cloning of the drive. Still not seen this behaviour before, but there you go.
cheers,
Mick

Similar Messages

Boot drive no longer moves to the top?

I just noticed that when I switch no another start up disk (CCC clone on external FW drive), that the active system HD icon no longer displays itself on the top right side on the desktop. It just stays were it was.
Why would it no longer move to the top? I got confused the other day and almost tossed a bunch of important files that I thought were on the active system drive...
Hope it's just a 10.5.6 bug that will get fixed in the next update.
Anyone else notice this?
Dan-

It's a bug that occurs if you update a bootable volume via Software Update or a backup/cloning app. It's been filed. Boot into each bootable volume, move the boot volume icon to the top, and it should stay there during subsequent reboots.

Procedure to replace boot drive.

Hi folks,
I'm feeling especially dense tonight. Have been googling and just can't find what I need. I have an Imac running OSX 10.8.5 My boot drive no longer passes SMART. I have an external drive running time machine. My question is...... When I install a new drive, is it just a simple matter of booting using control-R and restoring through time machine? If not, what exactly do I need to do?
Also, how dificult is it to take apart the Imac and replace the drive?
And lastly, I need to make sure I'm interpreting this correctly. In my disk utilities window, topmost it displays: "500.11 GB ST3500418AS" in red. If I select that, on the right side of the screen is displayed "This device has a hardware problem that can not be repaired" It does not give me any verify or repair buttons to use. Right below that on the left is my Macintosh HD. My computer was running poorly, and checking around utilities, I found that this drive had errors. However, verifying, then repairing that drive worked great. The computer is running great again. So, am I correct that "Macintosh HD" is a partition of 500.11.........? And that the drive is physically failing?
Thanks folks. I couldn't find what I wanted on Google, I don't know why.

What model year is your iMac? If it is new enogh that it came with Lion or Mt Lion Pre-Installed then yes once you change the hard drive you use Command + r key (Not Control + r) and that may boot you to the Online Internet recovery system from which you can Restore your Mac from your Time Machine backup drive.
If it older and originally came with Snow Leopard then you;ll need to use the original system reinstall disc to boot the computer and then Restore fron your time machine backup drive. Once you repplace the hard drive on system older than when Lion came out you might not have access to the Online recovery system as it wasn't included on older Mac computers and the drive that has the built in Recovery HD partition from the install of either Lion, Mt Lion or Mavericks is no longer in the system.
So what model year is your Mac and what version of OS X came on it when it was new?

My internal hard drive no longer boots. Boots just fine in external usb enclosure.

My internal hard drive no longer boots when inside my laptop. The drive boots just fine in external usb enclosure. It is also fully recognized when internal (as seen in single user mode, recovery mode or while booting from another drive).
I have tried:
with disk utilities
•fixing permissions
•repairing disk
in single user mode
•fsck -fy
zapping the pram
removing ram and zapping the pram
Any suggestions or diagnostics would be appreciated.

Can't believe I spent days reformating my hard drive, restoring it, getting another hard drive... and it was all a cable that failed. I wonder what can make an internal cable like that fail (seems like the least likely part of all to fail).
Thanks PlotinusVeritas
Thanks to ifixit:
bit.ly/1q0EnOx
If you can't fix it, you don't own it!

How to position boot drive icon to top right on clone

Under 10.4 my boot drive icon always appeared at the top right. This is particularly useful when I boot from a clone, so that I do not carelessly do something believing that I have booted from my main drive. Under Leopard, however, the boot drive icon does NOT appear in the upper right when I boot from my clones. Rather, the icon of the main drive stays there. Any way to restore this Tiger capability? I know that I can manually place the icon on each clone, but that defeats the purpose, since it reverts with each new cloning. Thanks!

I don't have two Leopard drives at the moment, though I have Leopard installed on the main partition of my internal hard drive, with Tiger installed on a smaller partition. Currently, when running Leopard, the Leopard drive is in the upper right, with the Tiger "drive" below it. If I manually move these icons so the Tiger "drive" is in the upper right, and if I then right-click the desktop and select Arrange By ->Kind, the icons revert to the Leopard drive being in the upper right. Would arranging your desktop icons by "Kind" give you what you are looking for?
Ken

Changing Boot Drives and Keep Your Time Machine History

A problem with Time Machine is that it is specific to the target and backup drives. Change one or the other and TM will want to do a new full backup. If you don't have enough space, it will delete your old backups. HOWEVER, this is a way to install a new boot (or other) drive that TM is backing up and get it to pick up where it left off doing incremental backups. This is extremely helpful if you change your boot drive. In my case, I moved from a HDD to an SSD but wanted to keep my history intact. TIme Machine "knows" which drive to backup based on the UUID (unique drive identifier) so merely changing the name of the drive in the Finder won't do it. You need to change the UUID in the latest backup of TM.
Note: This is not for the faint of heart or technically challenged. It also requires a mild knowledge of unix or at least the ability to follow instructions TO THE LETTER! You will change the UUID from the Latest Backup in Time Machine from the "old" drive to the "new" drive thus tricking TM into thinking the new drive is the old drive and it will continue to do incremental backups of the new drive. The technique described below was originally developed under OS 10.5 (and posted on the MAC OS HINTS 10.5 blog but I have just used it under Snow Leopard. It might work for newer OSs but I haven't tried them. I actually did 2 things: 1) Installed a larger TM drive and 2) installed a SSD as a boot drive. I will post under a different title to provide information on installing a larger TM drive since putting that information here may be confusing.
You will need 2 Unix commands: xattr and fsaclctl. xattr is included in OS 10.6 Unix shell but fsaclctl is not. You will have to get fsaclctl from a version of OS 10.5 using the techniques described in the article posted below. I had an old 10.5 disc and found it in: /sbin/fsaclctl at the root directory of my 10.5 hard drive. I also performed the technicque described below logged in as root but this may merely logged in as an administrotor.
** How to change your boot (or any other) drive and get Time Machine to just pick up where it left off doing incremental backups and not do a full backup of the new drive:
1) Turn OFF Time Machine
2) Install the new drive
3) Clone the old drive to the new drive (in my case HDD -> SSD) using SuperDuper, CarbonCopyCloner or even Disk Utility
4) Make sure you have both xattr and fsaclctl commands installed
5) Open Terminal
6) Follow the instructions here:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090213071015789&query=time+machine +new+disc
Note: you may need to use the command switch "l" (the letter l) to see the ascii version of the UUID
sudo xattr -l com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID my_partition
Note: Unix uses spaces (white space) as delimiters and is always case sensitive so if you have spaces in the name of your drives, you MUST put the drive name in quotation marks:
if the drive name is: My HDD then to list the contents of the drive in Unix would use the command ls thus:
> ls "My HDD"
will list the contents of My HDD
(the command: > ls My HDD (without quotation marks) will produce an error - no such file or directory)
When you've followed the above procedure and turned Time Machine back on, the first time TM may warn you that the disc has been changed and "someone may be trying to trick your computer" into using the new drive. Answer: do the backup
I wish I could take credit for this brilliant technique but I just followed it and it worked for me. I also read the entire thread before starting.

The two drives are handled as separate drives, even if they have the same name.
In essence, the old backups are from a drive that's no longer connected; see #E3 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.

My boot drive space constantly decreases until reboot

So the longer I leave my imac on, running 10.7.4, the slower and slower it gets, and the more spinning beach balls I get.
At the same time, there becomes less and less free space on my boot drive. I mean over the course of 2 days it can drop from 77GB free to 63GB free.
What the heck is going on? And how can I figure out what the culprit is?

Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
(1) You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
(2) You don't have enough memory installed for your usage pattern.
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination. In Activity Monitor, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table once or twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If one process (not including "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more memory over time without ever releasing it.
This suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details:
Memory Usage Performance Guidelines: About the Virtual Memory System
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.

Free space on boot drive constantly decreases until reboot

Hi there. I have a really weird thing happening that I've never seen before.
I'm running 10.7.4 on an iMac, and have about 45GB free on the system drive. At least that's right after I boot up the system. After that, the free space available on my HD slowly but constantly decreases, and the computer slowly but surely becomes less responsive. When the free space on the boot drive gets down around 37GB (which takes 2-3 days... I usually never turn the machine off) I get so many spinning beach balls... in ALL applications... that the computer becomes basically unuseable and I am forced to reboot. But as soon as I do, free space is back up to 45GB, and computer is snappy and fast again.
What the heck?

Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
(1) You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
(2) You don't have enough memory installed for your usage pattern.
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination. In Activity Monitor, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table once or twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If one process (not including "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more memory over time without ever releasing it.
This suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details:
Memory Usage Performance Guidelines: About the Virtual Memory System
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.

Updated software on Macbook Air and bootcamp partition disappeared. Windows boot option no longer appears. Can I get it back and the data?

Updated software on Macbook Air and bootcamp partition disappeared. Windows boot option no longer appears. Can I get it back and the data?

Amy, is there a chance they could both be Syncing to another device that has the data erased?
What are the sizes & modification dates on the files you found?
Could be many things, we should start with this to be safe, though 2 different ones would seem unlikely to be this problem...
"Try Disk Utility
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu at the top of the screen. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Select your Mac OS X volume.
5. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Then try a Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes.
(Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive.)
If perchance you can't find your install Disc, at least try it from the Safe Boot part onward.

Is the spotlight index stored on the boot drive or individual volumes?

Hello!
My questions are pretty simple, and are sumarized here (from the block of text below):
First, if I have several external hard drives, is the Spotlight index file for each drive stored on the external hard drive, or on OS X's boot drive?
Secondly, if it's stored on the boot drive, can I copy these files to another Tiger-running Mac to eliminate the need to re-index the hard drives? Where do I find them?
Third: Leopard's Spotlight has quite a few new features. Even if the Tiger index files are stored on the external drive, will it need to re-index the drive to support the new feature set?
Now for the long explenation:
I have been preparing to upgrade my Powerbook to Leopard within the next month or two, and as such, I bought a new hard drive to dedicate one of my old drives to Leopard and Time Machine. Because I have three extrernal hard drives, I needed to move about 500 GB of data between the thee drives to make room for what was on the now-dedicated drive. Of course, this requires that Spotlight re-index the "new" drives.
Today, I left all of the drives attached to my old G4, running Tiger, while it sits there indexing the three drives, totaling around a terrabyte of external storage. Because Spotlight tends to hog all of the available CPU time, and the G4 should be done indexing the drives, it would save me a lot of time if I could copy the index files over from the G4 to my Powerbook to avoid indexing them all over again. That is, if the index files are not on the external drives already. If they are on the G4's boot drive, where do I find these files?
Finally, I plan to reformat the internal hard drive of my Powerbook when I install Leopard - I make a habit of doing a fresh install for every major upgrade (eg, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, etc). To estimate the amount of time needed to upgrade, I'd be nice to know if Leopard will need to re-index the files on the external drives - even if Tiger's spotlight index is stored on the externals - for Leopard's new Spotlight features. Will it need to re-index? I would assume that until Leopard arrives, most people wouldn't know this, of course.
Thanks a bunch,
-Dan

Each drive's Spotlight index is located on that drive.
(25154)

SSD Boot Drive for Mac Pro

Apologies in advance, I’m really not great with this sort ofstuff.
Basically, what I would like to do is add an SSD to my MacPro and use that as my boot drive. Ihave a 1TB HDD which is currently doing everything but I’d like to use thispurely to store music, videos etc.
As well as booting to Lion, I’d also like to use the SSD torun Windows 7 with VMware Fusion – presume this doesn’t cause any problems?
The plan would be to have the system software andapplications on the SSD and everything else on the HDD. Only thing I’m not sure of is where the homedirectory should go?
Does this all sound like a realistic goal? Also, will this be an relatively straightforward process? Migration Assistant?
Thanks.

So in effect, lets just say your SSD drive fails. As you are currently setup, can you boot from your secondary drive to your backed up OSX, or do you have to have restore that backup image to a new hard drive?
My whole rational of keeping the home dir separate (disk) from the boot dir is that I can switch among any number of boot drives any time I want to. For example, as a hypothetical case*, I use 10.6.5, and I want to update to 10.6.6, 10.6.7, or 10.6.8, I just do it to my ssd. Now I can still boot from my 10.6.5 backup, say for the sake of comparison to some weird behavior I see on the update, without a blink of the eye. I'm still using my same (common) home dir because it is not involved with the update. If I want to go "back" I can restore the ssd from my 10.6.5 backup.
Of course I would actually do it the other way and boot and update from the backup leaving the ssd alone (don't want to write to it any more than I have to). Only if I was satisfied with the new OS on the backup would I then update my ssd.
The point of all this is keeping the home dir off the boot dir allows you to "flit", "jump", switch, whatever, to different OSs (or backups of the same OS) at will. Your home dir is none the wiser unless the OS dramatically changes or screws things up (so that's why this technique may or may not work across major OS revisions -- Snow Leopard to Lion for example, but its great with a single OS sequence).
While everyone always debates the pros and cons of keeping the home dir separate from the boot dir, what always seems to get lost or not mentioned is the benefit of being able to switch among the OSs when they are separate.
So all of this was a long way of answering your question -- no you don't have to backup to the original boot drive before using it. Just boot from the backup. Your home dir couldn't care less.
* For me going to 10.6.6, .7., .8 is hypothetical since I use 10.6.5 and have no current plans of updating beyond that (can you say "app store"? -- don't want it my machine -- and I won't debate any comments on this -- its my personal decision. And besides this is off topic.).

What's the best way to clone my boot drive?

I just bought a new 500GB drive for my G4. What's the best way to clone my boot drive?
Is there a way to put the new drive on the buss as a second drive and then copy everything from my boot drive to the new drive? How do I make the new drive bootable?
Or
Do I have to install OSX on the new drive, put the old boot drive on the buss as a second drive and migrate everything to the new drive with the Utilities Migration Assitant program?
Are there programs available to make this easier? Where & how much?
Thanks for any help I can get.

bamim2:
Dr. Smoke's FAQ Backup and Recovery has excellent advice on developing a backup strategy.
You already have a larger extrnal HDD (Hopefully it is firewire?) The next step is to format and partition the HDD. (see step-by-step below). And thirdly you will need a good cloning utility. Carbon Copy Cloner has already been suggested, and the latest version is excellent. I, personally, prefer SuperDuper for its ease of use and efficiency. Both are great tools and relatively simple to use.
I mentioned the hope that you have a firewire. One of the wonderful benefits of using an external firewire HDD for backing up is that you can make a bootable clone. This gives you an emergency boot drive in case of a problem. It also gives you an external device for running diagnostics and repairs from the extnernal to the computer and vice-versa.
Congratulations on taking the first step toward securing your computer and your data!
Formatting, Partitioning Zeroing a Hard Disk Drive
Warning! This procedure will destroy all data on your Hard Disk Drive. Be sure you have an up-to-date, tested backup of at least your Users folder and any third party applications you do not want to re-install before attempting this procedure.
Boot from the install CD holding down the "C" key.
Select language
Go to the Utilities menu (Tiger) Installer menu (Panther & earlier) and launch Disk Utility.
Option for formatting an External HDD
Connect external HDD to computer
Turn on external HDD
Start up computer and log in
Go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility and launch DU.
Select your HDD (manufacturer ID) in left side bar.
Select Partition tab in main panel. (You are about to create a single partition volume.)
Select number of partition in pull-down menu above Volume diagram.
(Note 1: One partition is normally preferable for an internal HDD. External HDDs usually have more than one. See Dr. Smoke’s FAQ Backup and Recovery for tips on partitioning external HDD
Note 2: For more partitions than one, after you have selected the number of partitions you can adjust the size of the partition by selecting the top partition and typing in the size; then move down if more adjustments need to be made..)
Type in name in Name field (usually Macintosh HD)
Select Volume Format as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Click Partition button at bottom of panel.
Select Erase tab
Select the sub-volume (indented) under Manufacturer ID (usually Macintosh HD).
Check to be sure your Volume Name and Volume Format are correct.
Optional: Select on Security Options button (Tiger) Options button (Panther & earlier).
Select Zero all data. (This process will map out bad blocks on your HDD. However, it could take several hours. If you want a quicker method, don't go to Security Options and just click the Erase button.)
Click OK.
Click Erase button
Quit Disk Utility.
Good luck.
cornelius

System folders on another drive other than boot drive

hi, guys...
does anyone know anything about moving your folders such as "documents, photos, movies, music" to an external drive or separate partition in snow leopard? or how this might affect Lion?
i've found some online documentation that shows you can move your entire home folder (which i don't want to do), and some documentation that you can use symbolic links (via a few terminal commands) so that the actual system folder can be moved elsewhere with an alias being the actual reference folder.
the reason i want to do this is to move my music and photo folders to a storage partition. i add and delete so often on these that it ends up fragmenting my drive and bogs down my startup disk. also, i'm going to move soon to an SSD as my startup drive, either 128 or 240 gb and use it only for system files and move all my data elsewhere.
but as you know, os x likes certain things in the default folders.
so i guess i'm looking for anyone's thoughts on this.
oh, and i do have a question. if i can use a symbolic link and have the actual data reside elsewhere, if i do a time machine backup and it's backing up all my system and user folders, will it backup the data that resides elsewhere, or would i have to actually back up separately from the other location where the music and photos reside?
is this making any sense to anyone?

makes a lot of sense. I am looking for an answer myself. My documents folder long ago outgrew it's place on the boot drive. It would be nice to keep it in the user folder organized on another disc

Can the creative cloud apps be installed on a drive other than the boot drive?

I have an SSD for the boot drive and keep most apps on an 'applications' drive. It appears that CC apps install by default to the boot drive. Am I incorrect? Can I control what drive they install on?

Yes you can change the install location:
Launch the Adobe Application Manager.
Click on your name in the top left and from the context menu choose Preferences.
Change the Install Location to the one you want.

How to move the photos from my boot drive to a newly installed hard drive?

- regarding iPhoto's storage, etc.... Where is the iPhoto library located anyway? And - how to transfer it to the brand new hard drive?
I want to add a ned hard drive just to keep the media there, so I would like to transfer all the GBs worth of photos (the whole iPhoto library or - what folder, really?).
What do I need to do in order to accomplish this task?, and assuming that there is no problem moving all the photos (as I understand it would mean Originals, Modified & Data) - can I then just delete the original iPhoto Library (but from where?) somewhere on my boot drive?
Basically - I want to move all the photos from my boot drive to the newly installed hard drive, and after a successful move, I'd like to delete all the same photos from its original location (the boot drive).

One addition to Larry's steps: make sure the external drive is formatted OS X Extended (journaled) and have it set to ignore ownership as seen here:
TIP: For insurance against the iPhoto database corruption that many users have experienced I recommend making a backup copy of the Library6.iPhoto (iPhoto.Library for iPhoto 5 and earlier) database file and keep it current. If problems crop up where iPhoto suddenly can't see any photos or thinks there are no photos in the library, replacing the working Library6.iPhoto file with the backup will often get the library back. By keeping it current I mean backup after each import and/or any serious editing or work on books, slideshows, calendars, cards, etc. That insures that if a problem pops up and you do need to replace the database file, you'll retain all those efforts. It doesn't take long to make the backup and it's good insurance.
I've created an Automator workflow application (requires Tiger or later), iPhoto dB File Backup, that will copy the selected Library6.iPhoto file from your iPhoto Library folder to the Pictures folder, replacing any previous version of it. It's compatible with iPhoto 6 and 7 libraries and Tiger and Leopard. Just put the application in the Dock and click on it whenever you want to backup the dB file. iPhoto does not have to be closed to run the application, just idle. You can download it at Toad's Cellar. Be sure to read the Read Me pdf file.
Note: There's now an Automator backup application for iPhoto 5 that will work with Tiger or Leopard.

Boot Drive no longer at top?

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