Disk Utility: Software mirror message behavior

Dear readers
I did setup a Mac Mini Server the following way.
Disk Utility stared from the System DVD.
- Delete both internal drives
- Create a mirror inside disk utility
- Make two partitions on this newly created drive
- Installed the system
- Configured it after update
So far every thing works fine.
My question is now,
- how does the system announce the information, that the mirror is broken because of a defect of one of the mirrored drives?
- if there is such a message, is it possible to use this message inside a script which would send a report to a known email account if something goes wrong?
- has someone done something similar or how doe administrators of bigger systems (like Xserve) handle this?
Thank you for anyones response and tips
Kind regards from Switzerland
Thomas

Hi !
MacOS X perform doesn't perform information on Software Mirror Status…
You must perform a shell script for that…
My2Cent.

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Disk utility, software update, garage band, security, etc. will not open.

I tried to update my itunes about 2 weeks ago. it started downloading, maybe it did all the way, i dont know. because everything stopped working. i can use safari/firefox, office programs and some others but when i try opening disk utility, software update, security (and other programs) they will not open. they come up in the bar at the bottom of the screen for a second then vanish with no warning or error (and no program actually opens).
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Hi, and a warm welcome to the forums!
Qyuick, do thus 1st...
"Try Disk Utility
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc that came with your computer, 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. (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. Click the disclosure triangle to the left of the hard drive icon to display the names of your hard disk volumes and partitions.
5. Select your Mac OS X volume.
6. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Then boot off the HD and...
About Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751
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Xserve RAID: Server Monitor says degraded, disk utility says mirror FAILED.

Xserve Quad Intel 4x2GH
4096 GB RAM
OS X Server 10.4.11
Xserve RAID 7TB 14x 500 GB ADM via dual fiber channel, Mirrored, 3.5 TB array.
Flashing yellow indicator light on Xserve this morning. Investigated and found that RAID Admin says everything is OK, all 14 drives normal.
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All LED's are solid green across the front of the ADMs.
Since all my drives are reporting OK, could this be a problem with the Fiber Channel interfaces?
Should I just backup (again), shut down and rebuild the mirror using Disk Utility?

Hi Kappy<
I am trying to migrate user data from a RAID - 1 slice from my old PowerMac G4 running OS X 10.4.11 to my new MacBook Pro running OS X 10.5.4 by reading a mirror RAID slice from my old Mac that is mounted in an external drive enclosure and connected by FireWire.
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Why can my new computer not read my old computers disk, and how can I change permissions, or make the old drive readable by the new mac.
Regrettably I am away from the original Desktop, and cannot load the old drive back into it, connect the two machines and migrate that way. My only option for reaching my necessary data is to retrieve it off the drive I have with me.
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Disk Utility Software RAID

Hi everyone,
I know how to create a Software RAID in Disk Utility. Let's say I do that with 2 identical FireWire drives. What happens or is the best practice when one drive fails? Will shutting down everything and then exchanging the bad drive with a new one issue an automatic rebuild like Hardware RAIDs can? Or will I have to rebuild it manually somehow? What if the RAID is the boot volume, will that make any difference in the procedure?
Does anybody have experience with this and would like to share it?
Thank you!
Björn

Hi, I am a bit confused. I just set up a mirrored RAID array with to Firewire 800 drives using two 500GB drives. Under the options button in the RAID setup was a box that you could check to automatically rebuild the array. Will this not do the job if one of the drives fails?
Also, I have set Time Machine to use this as its backup drive. It is much faster to update than using the Time Capsule drive and cuts down on the local network traffic a lot. An added benefit seems to be that the files are written just like files on any other drive and are also accessible using the Finder.
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From Disk Utility's Help:
A disk in a RAID set has failed or is missing
Disk Utility monitors the status of the disks in a RAID set. If you see a message that a disk is missing or has failed, there are several things you can try to solve the problem.
If a disk is missing, make sure it is connected to power and turned on, and that it's connected to your computer. If you are using a FireWire or USB disk, you may need to disconnect it then connect it again.
Use the First Aid pane to repair the disks in the RAID, then check the RAID set to see if it still reports an error. You may need to unmount the RAID set to repair the disks.
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The problem is solved,
   I took the Mac mini to the
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Disk Utility internal error message

I am receiving an error message every time I try to repair permissions on my MB running OS X 10.4:
error:
Disk Utility Internal Error
Disk Utility has lost its connection with the Disk Management Tool and cannot continue. Please quit and re launch Disk Utility.
Tried that several times to no avail. After quittting Disk Utility, system becomes very sluggish and Finder stops responding.
I then booted from the installation CD and ran a Hard Disk integrity check. It checked Ok. Then I tried a permission repair and got the exact same error message quoted above.
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There was a problem with this a couple of years ago involving iTunes Library Receipt files. See [Mac OS X 10.3: Repair Disk Permissions 'Disk Utility has lost its connection with the Disk Management Tool.|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303132].
It seems unlikely that would surface now, but the suggested fix is worth trying. The article also mentions looking at Console log. Console is in Applications/Utilities.
Also, see this recent thread in the Panther forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1585878

Disk utility software?

Can anyone recommend a reliable disk utility--something that can recover deleted files/folders, defragment and wipe unused disk space? I realize that Norton is no longer a wise choice. Is there anything that works well with OS X?
Carl Kalwaitis

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Note that Intel drives are partitioned differently from PowerPC drives. You cannot boot a PowerPC Mac from an Intel-partitioned disk drive. You cannot boot an Intel Mac from a PowerPC version of OS X. As of now the two are fairly much exclusive. It's possible this may change with a future version of OS X, but for now that's the situation. You may find reading the following helpful in your switch to the Intel Mac:
A Basic Guide for Migrating to Intel-Macs
If you are migrating a PowerPC system (G3, G4, or G5) to an Intel-Mac be careful what you migrate. Keep in mind that some items that may get transferred will not work on Intel machines and may end up causing your computer's operating system to malfunction.
Rosetta supports "software that runs on the PowerPC G3 or G4 processor that are built for Mac OS X". This excludes the items that are not universal binaries or simply will not work in Rosetta:
Classic Environment, and subsequently any Mac OS 9 or earlier applications
Screensavers written for the PowerPC
System Preference add-ons
All Unsanity Haxies
Browser and other plug-ins
Contextual Menu Items
Applications which specifically require the PowerPC G5
Kernel extensions
Java applications with JNI (PowerPC) libraries
See also What Can Be Translated by Rosetta.
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The same problem will exist for any hardware drivers such as mouse software unless the drivers have been compiled as universal binaries. For third-party mice the only current choice is USB Overdrive. Contact the developer or manufacturer of your third-party mouse software to find out when a universal binary version will be available.
Also be careful with some backup utilities and third-party disk repair utilities. Disk Warrior (does not work), TechTool Pro (does not work), SuperDuper (newest release works), and Drive Genius (untested) may not work properly on Intel-Macs. The same caution may apply to the many "maintenance" utilities that have not yet been converted to universal binaries.
Before migrating or installing software on your Intel-Mac check MacFixit's Rosetta Compatibility Index.
Additional links that will be helpful to new Intel-Mac users:
Intel In Macs
Apple Guide to Universal Applications
MacInTouch List of Compatible Universal Binaries
MacInTouch List of Rosetta Compatible Applications
MacUpdate List of Intel-Compatible Software
Written by Kappy with additional contributions from a brody.

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I'm having the same problem. Misery loves company, but I'd like an anwer better!! Any chance you found a solution? If so please post.

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Glad I could help. Thanks for the s.

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I'm setting up a Mac Pro with Leopard and have four Maxtor 6G160E0 160GB hard drives that I'm trying to set up as two Mirrored drive sets. Everything seemed to go fine, created the two mirror sets, installed Leopard, configured and tested two user accounts and Office 2004, then updated everything to the latest version. When done I shut it down planning on moving it to it's final home tonight.
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I've searched for similar issues and found none so I thought I'd check here and see if anyone had any ideas.

G'day Zeekm,
Thank you for that. I did this and it seems to work. The Disk Utility GUI does not seem to work.
Hope this helps some one,
#Checked the RAID status
root# diskutil checkRAID
RAID SETS
===============================================================================
Name: Server_HD
Unique ID: 7E31E20E-F53D-4D76-AD37-139C4E1440AB
Type: Mirror
Status: Degraded
Size: 1000070610944 B
Device Node: disk2
Apple RAID Version: 2
# Device Node UUID Status
0 disk1s3 BAC72F86-B05F-4B0F-97D3-58A6207E7DFA Failed
1 disk0s3 2BFB55BB-EFF9-438C-A1F9-A8ED7A93D385 Online
===============================================================================
#Told it to resync
root# diskutil repairMirror disk2 disk1s3
Note: Syncing data between mirror partitions can take a very long time.
Note: The mirror should now be repairing itself. You can check its status using 'diskutil listRAID'.
temp:~ root# diskutil listRAID
RAID SETS
===============================================================================
Name: Server_HD
Unique ID: 7E31E20E-F53D-4D76-AD37-139C4E1440AB
Type: Mirror
Status: Degraded
Size: 1000070610944 B
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===============================================================================
Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Arthur

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Update: (first, reviewing problem that I and others have been having, including on 10.4.x systems):
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A system problem was involved that became, briefly, a "known issue" that was solved in the next minor update. Solved, anyway, by the advice given by the last poster. Thanks! SJ

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I have a problem with Disk Utility crashing (error message is the generic "application unexpectedly quit")on launch after upgrading from Tiger to Leopard. I bought the family pack upgrade and had no problem upgrading my G4 mini. However, my Intel mini 1.33GHz, seems to have gotten spooked. For the most part the pgrade was fine but somehow I lost Disk Utility. Has this been seen before? What might I try? Incidentally, the mini has 2Gigs of RAM and plenty of free disk space. The problem occurs in all accounts. Oh, I forgot to mention that I also upgraded to the latest version of Leopard (without checking whether disk utility worked after to install from the disk - so technically, this could be an combo upgrade issue? Having said that, I did exactly the same with the G4 mini and had no issues.
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aspalten wrote:
I have a problem with Disk Utility crashing (error message is the generic "application unexpectedly quit")on launch after upgrading from Tiger to Leopard. I bought the family pack upgrade and had no problem upgrading my G4 mini. However, my Intel mini 1.33GHz, seems to have gotten spooked. For the most part the pgrade was fine but somehow I lost Disk Utility. Has this been seen before? What might I try? Incidentally, the mini has 2Gigs of RAM and plenty of free disk space. The problem occurs in all accounts. Oh, I forgot to mention that I also upgraded to the latest version of Leopard (without checking whether disk utility worked after to install from the disk - so technically, this could be an combo upgrade issue? Having said that, I did exactly the same with the G4 mini and had no issues.
Any thoughts?
Thanks much!
Andrew
Boot from the Leopard DVD - hold down "C" key with disk already in place - and after the language screen, in the menu top left, select Utilities and run the DU from there. Repair HD and permissions.
If you did a "merge" install from Tiger (default) then you may have brought some things along that Leopard does not like.
Did you have any "haxies" or other old 3rd party apps installed in Tiger? Most of them won't work with Leopard and need to be replaced or removed.

Disk Utility: Software mirror message behavior

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