Drive swap

The original 250G hard drive is in a safe - just in case I need it. Probably only if I need to send it to AppleCare. I filled all the bays with 500G hard drives. But Aperture was getting slow because the 500G was too small with my iPhoto library that I never use and my iTunes library which continues to grow. (I'm a hopeless iTunes Music Store addict.)
So, I bought a Western Digital 640G WD6400AAKS to replace the drive in bay 3 where my Aperture library resides. As easy as Apple made these to upgrade, I still hesitate just a bit so I didn't install the drive until today. It arrived a week ago.
I took the drive out of bay 1 and put in the new one. Then I copied my Aperture library to the new one after formatting. The dialog said it would take about three hours. I took a nap. When the copy was done, I put the old drive back in bay 1 and put the new replacement in bay 3. The old drive that was in bay 3 is in a safe that will be taken to a safe deposit box along with the original 250G drive so I won't have to worry about losing any photos from my Aperture library. I also moved my iTunes Library to bay 4's drive which is just used for a scratch disk.
Now. On to my questions.
With the Aperture Library copied to the new drive, I decided to right-click the Aperture library and "Open with..." ->Aperture on the icon. Aperture opened the library. When I went to Aperture's preference to point it to the new location, it was already changed. So, does this mean I can just click on Aperture's application icon on the dock from now on?
I plan to weed a lot of photos out of my Aperture library, but I suspect it will get too big for this 640G drive shortly since I'm only shooting only in RAW now. I know I can still access the really old stuff from my drive going to the safe deposit box.
However, looking ahead, I'm thinking of putting the Aperture library on an external Firewire drive - probably 1.5T. Will an external FW disk be slower than the internal bus? I also have an external FW for backups and I have heard that more than one device on the FW bus will slow down the bus. If so, I would be better off putting the Aperture library on another internal. But, I understand the max size internal drive I can have in my (March 2007) Mac Pro is 1T, true?
Last question. Where is a good place to get a FW enclosure for SATA drives? All that I could find were for USB enclosures and I want to recycle my old drives for use as backup disks. Are there FW 800 enclosures for SATA 2 disks? I'm also considering a dock for the SATA drives, so I can copy the data to one or two large FW drives to go to the safe deposit box. The docks I found were for IDE disks.
Thanks. BTW, Aperture is running much faster with more room-277G free space. It got down to only 30G before I noticed and culled a bunch of photos to allow for 90G free.

Is it not possible to Archive part of your Aperture library?
Surely you don't need constant access to everything you ever shot?
I'm a pro photographer, and the way I work with my MacPro is this:
Bay 1 - 640GB WD6400AAKS - Mac OS, Software & iTunes Library. Currently has 500GB free space.
Bay 2 - 320GB WD3200AAJS - Bootable Clone of Bay 1, backed up daily. This is the original drive that shipped with my MP, I intend to shelve it soon and replace with another WD6400AAKS.
Bay 3 - 640GB WD6401AALS - Pending Jobs. My jobs can run to 60GB each, and I usually have 7-9 jobs on the go simultaneously.
Bay 4 - 640GB WD6400AAKS - Photoshop Scratch Disk.
Attached via FW800:
LaCie D2 Quadra 750GB - Clone of Bay 3, backed up daily.
LaCie D2 Quadra 500GB - Last 30 or so jobs previous, edited down to save disk space.
LaCie D2 Quadra 500GB - Clone of above.
The rest is burnt to DVD, as well as being on a bunch of portable hard drives that are regularly checked for integrity.
I'm thinking of ditching the LaCies for a 5-bay JBOD enclosure, and also one of these for secondary backups:
http://www.storagedepot.co.uk/External-Hard-Drives/Hard-Drive-Cradles/sc883/p877 .aspx
That way, I'll have more control over drive quality.
I use PhaseOne's CaptureOne Pro software, as jobs/shoots are saved as standalone 'sessions', rather than having to be part of some never-ending Library.
All eggs in one basket is never a good idea, if I were you i'd be looking into archiving the older work you rarely access.

Similar Messages

Bad iBook G4 WiFi reception after hard-drive swap

I just replaced the hard drive in my iBook G4 with a larger one. Everything works fine except that the WiFi only works in close proximity to our Airport Extreme Router. Our other 2 current Macs and our 2 iPhones continue to have good WiFi connections. The iBook G4 had good WiFi reception before I changed out the hard drive. The stock Airport Extreme antenna connector is well-seated, and the plug and jack look fine. I disassembled the iBook and traced the antenna wiring to see I could spot any anaomolies.

Thanks, Ronda!
I just swapped the Apple M8881LL/A AirPort Extreme Card in my Power Mac G5 and my iBook G4. Both cards work perfectly in the G5. The "new" card works a little better in the iBook G4, but not anywhere near its performance in the G5 or the original AirPort card in the iBook before the hard-drive swap.
The antenna was treated with great care in the disassemblies, so I don't think it was damaged from that. What does the antenna connect to inside the iBook? Could it be that it's not making contact on one of the shields?
Any help is much appreciated!

Drives swapping [solved]

I have been running arch completely reliably on my desktop for about 18months. It's a superb distro - well done - this is what slackware should have been!
The existing hard drive (SATA) is partitioned:
sda1 ntfs/xp
sda2 swap
sda3 ext3/xarch
and all was working well...
I recently added space by dropping a spare IDE drive in - with one big ntfs partition. Now the drive order at boot seems random:
Grub ALWAYS sees: hd(0,0), (hd0,1), (hd0,2) and (hd1,0), so I can boot the kernel from (hd0,2) as normal. The problem comes with the kernel line, sometimes the line
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda3
will boot and sometimes it will hang with a 'waiting 10 secs for sda3' error. In these cases the kernel is seeing the drives swapped - so it actually wanted a root partition in /dev/sdb3.
The workaround I have in place at the moment is to have two grub entries, one with
root=/dev/sda3
and the other
root=/dev/sdb3
. Whichever one I choose has a 50% chance of being correct so I can usually boot within 2 or 3 tries. But this is a workaround rather than a solution.
I have searched the forums and wiki but could not find anything relevant. Surely there must be something that I am overlooking? What could be causing this and how could I solve the problem?
Thanks in advance, Richard.
Last edited by r_j_h (2010-03-06 20:42:39)

You should name the drives by UUID:
Arch Wiki wrote:If your machine has more than one SATA, SCSI or IDE disk controller, the order in which their corresponding device nodes are added is random. This may result in device names like /dev/sdX and /dev/sdY switching around randomly on each boot, culminating in an unbootable system or kernel panic. Persistent naming solves these issues.
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UUID#by-uuid

Another hard drive swap question - re: 8GB partition for OSX in iMac 266

I have a Tangerine iMac 266 that I am setting up for a neighbor's son. The original 6GB hard drive was toast, so I swapped in an old 10GB drive that had previously been removed from an iMacDV 400. The 10GB "new" drive had OSX 10.3.1 and OS 9.1 on a single partition. I am aware that these early iMacs need OSX in a first partition of less than 8GB, so I expected that I would need to partition the "new" drive. However, while I was loading an install CD after powering up, the iMac booted fine into OSX, despite it NOT being located in a first partition of less than 8GB (and has continued operating well - booting multiple times in OS X and 9, surfing the net, etc...the only weirdness is a refusal of Word X to run).
I thought this was impossible, and in researching this I found that the Apple support site says that, for this computer, "Mac OS X must be installed on a volume that is contained entirely within the first 8 GB of its ATA hard disk." see http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106235
My Questions:
Is the 8GB limit only related to iINSTALLING OSX on these machines (and not RUNNING OSX)?
Will the machine run into problems later if a portion of the OS (i.e., during an update) gets installed outside of the first 8GB of the disk?
One of the log files says that the driver is out of date for the RageproC, and Classic applications that require more than 4MB of VRAM say that I don't have enough VRAM to run, yet the iMac has 6MB of VRAM (2 on MB and 4 in slot as listing by the system profiler) - do I need to (or should I) reinstall the system software (I already tried loading the latest ATI drivers, but it did't help)?
P.S. - to add more data points on the subject of RAM upgrades in these iMacs, my iMac 266 would not accept a 256MB PC-100 SO-DIMM that worked fine in an iBook and in the upper slot of a Rev. A iMac 233. Well, it accepted it, but only recognized the first 128MB.

I believe Duane is correct. Even with Mac OS 9, you can run fine as long as all OS components used during startup are within the first 8GB of space. However, (even with Mac OS 9) as soon as something used during startup ends up beyond that limit, you will get open firmware or a gray screen at startup. The Mac OS X does not allow the installation target to exceed the limit as a preventative measure, not because it won't work at all.
The best "non-technical" explanation I have heard as to why, is this... The IDE hardware (and its driver) can only "see" the first 8GB of space during the initial start up process before the OS is loaded. Once start up completes, control is handed to the OS, which can see the entire drive. Therefore, apps have no problem running from beyond the limit. Only components needed before the hand-off is constrained to the 8GB limit.
FYI - On my iMac and 120GB drive, 7.78 GB (as shown in a Finder window) is the precise point where the Mac OS X Installer allows the volume to be the install target. "Precise" to with a few hundred MB's.

Hard drive swapping procedure?

Hello fellow macaholics,
I've been a mac user for about 6 years now, I've had a few systems. Recently I sold a Powermac G4 733mhz. I had two hardrives installed in it. A 40gb and a 160gb partitioned into two with SpeedTools ATA Hi-Cap Support Driver (128/22). The operating system (10.3.9) and all my applications were installed on the 128gb partition. I just recently purchased a 400mhz slot loading G3 iMac. My question is can I swap out the 10gb (running 9.2.2)drive with the partitioned 160gb drive and boot up in panther?. If so is there a special procedure or would I be better off buying an external case and running my programs from the external. I sold my copies of panther with the g4. I have a set of imac 10.1.2 install disk from a previously owned iMac, so if I can't install the 160gb I will have to use the 10.1.2 OS untill I get tiger. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

Derek Robinson1...
I will spare you the legalities of possession of Panther without any software (on CD/DVD form) as it is likely to open the "Pandoras Box".
The more real issue involve basic recovery should the worse happen. In essense I would not use the 160GB drive under any software dependent situations. SpeedTools is a fix that I question its reliability, even for a short term use.
Suggestions would include a smaller HD for the iMac till you can get some replacement Mac OS of a higher version than Mac OS 10.1.x
BTW... Confirm your firmware version before allowing Mac OS 10.2 of greater on your iMac by any known methods (Other HD, CD/DVD, Utilities etc.) Apple System Profiler should show Boot ROM 4.1.f9. You can fry the machine otherwise.
...Ron

Fusion Drive & Swap files

From time to time on my new Mac Mini with 1 TB Fusion Drive, I am getting the following error: "Your Mac OS X startup disk has no more space available for application memory."
This would indicate an issue with being able to write swap files/virtual memory. If I understand how the Fusion Drive works, the virtual memory is stored on the 128 GB SSD portion. The SSD is full, considering I have 650 GB free on the 1.128 TB Fusion Drive.
Seems like a CoreStorage issue, as it's apparently not leaving enough space on the SSD for the swap files after the computer has been run for a while. I have 16 GB RAM in the Mini.
Restarting the computer solves the issue, although I often use the Mini in remote sessions and when this error comes up, performance on the Mini tends to be so sluggish that sometimes remote connections time out or drop, making it hard to even be able to restart the computer.

Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
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 twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If you don't see that column, select
View ▹ Columns ▹ Real Memory
from the menu bar.
If one process (excluding "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.
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.
The next 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

After The Hard Drive Swap?

Hi All
My Hard Disk swap didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped.
My attempts to clone my old drive were unsuccessful because Carbon Copy Cloner froze twice on me almost at the end of the cloning process. I gave up with CCC because cloning 60GB over 400 Mbs Firewire takes hours and hours. I subsequently learned from replies on the Bombich software forums that I could have restarted from where it left off - I'll remember that if I ever have to do it again.
I eventually managed to boot off the DVD drive. Because my disk was partially cloned, the installer thought that OS X was already on there and tried to upgrade the installation. This didn’t work, it wouldn’t boot. Eventually I realised what was going on, erased the drive first and then did a full install. I was then able to start off the new drive.
I’m just doing all the Tiger updates through Software Update. While I wait for that to complete, I have two remaining issues to resolve:
1. I now have no start up chime - although sound works. Can I fix that or is this a symptom that I’ve screwed up the repair?
2. I have my old drive in a Firewire enclosure and can read it OK. I’d like to get my users and applications off it and onto the new drive. How would you recommend I do that? I don’t know if it makes sense to selectively clone Users and Applications independently of everything else.
I’m sure all this is buried in some threads somewhere but my head is beginning to spin a bit. Hopefully you can help.
Thanks
Ian
iMac 17" Flat Panel (OS X 10.4.7)

Hi Swissfondue
Thanks for responding. I started to use it before I got your post!
I was going to reply after it completed to say if it was successful or not. I didn't see Migration Assistant referred to on the other threads about this issue that I've seen. In fact one or two specifically advise against trying to move users from one drive to another but maybe they were written before MA was available.
My machine is going much faster with these upgrades Don't know whether to attribute it to the extra RAM or the new disk.

RAID 5 Drive swap.

I have a RAID 5 setup with 4 1TB drives, one of them sounds like it's on it's last legs, heads zeroing repeatedly, so I went out and bought a replacement drive today, thought I had the dying drive pinpointed using smartctl, only one drive showed any SMART errros, so I figured that must be it. I manually failed that drive:
mdadm /dev/md0 -f /dev/sdf1
shutdown, swapped drives, turned the machine back on again, but I'm still hearing a head zero repeatedly. So I can only assume I've pulled out the wrong drive. Haven't started rebuilding the RAID yet or anything, is it possible to swap that drive back in without having to rebuild? I'm slightly worried that if I attempt to rebuild the array right now, with one dying drive in there it might not make it.

Well, I didn't overly answer my original question, but averted a crisis. Just went ahead and rebuild the RAID, didn't take as long as expected, seems like things will be just dandy.

Can I reconnect Time Machine backup after drive swap on OS X 10.6?

Hi,
I swapped my MacMini's HD few days ago (previous one was dying, had hardware issues). I used CCC and replaced with a hybrid drive. So far, so good. However, when I plugged back the external USB drive were I keep my Time Machine backups, it is not being recognized, TM wants to run a new full set.
I did some research and discovered that TM may use the HD or machine's UUID and that's why it's triggering the new FULL.
I also found this article by Pondini (which seems to be a guru on the topic, lol ):
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090213071015789
But attrb is not working, I guess such command it's not available on 10.6.8 ? ...
How can I reconnect Time Machine backups to the new HD? Or ... I simply cannot and I will have to delete and run a FULL set? I would prefer to keep my old backups, if possible, but it seems that with my OSX version that's not possible without workarounds.
Thanks in advance,

** EDIT **
The trick did not work :-(
I entered into TM and while I can see the old backups , I can't select them or do anything with them. Clearly, they have not been identified as previous backups, hence the reason for Today's FULL.
Ohh boy ... I'm about to give up ...

Hard Drive Swap and Time Machine

Hello,
Maybe a weird situation here - I couldn't find anything about this exact scenario online.
My wife and I own 2 identical early 2008 Macbook Pros. The body of her computer has recently taken serious cosmetic damage. I plan on upgrading to a new Macbook Pro soon, so I decided to just give her the body of mine, which is in nice shape. I thought the easiest way to do this would be just to open up both computers and swap the hard drives (put her hard drive into my computer, and mine into hers). I accomplished this easily and everything works, however when I tried to do a time machine backup neither external drive was recognized - I cannot backup either machine with this new setup, at least without starting an entirely new backup. If I hook my external drive to her computer (my old computer with her hard drive) time machine is allowing me to access my old backups stored in the external drive. If I hook my external drive to my machine (her computer with my hard drive) I cannot access any old backups. All attempts to backup are failing.
Is there something else I need to swap (hardware) to get this right? I would like to be able to resume backups as they were.
Thanks for any help!
MacBook Pro early 2008
OS X 10.5.8
Processor Name:          Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:          2.4 GHz
Memory 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

TimeMachine is specific to each computer. Your serial numbers, etc... are all different. All you did was swap the hard drive, and I believe I read somewhere that if you use encryption on your TimeMachine backup, you need the passcode AND the computer you backed up from originally.
Disclaimer: I believe I read the encryption thing at one point, but I am not 100% certain about that part.

Super Drive Swap

HI,
I have a MacBook Pro(2.4Ghz Santa Rosa Model) and a MacBook (2.16GHz).
The Optical drive in the MBP is dead and will not accept any disks. I think it has had some physical damage as there is something that blocks the disc from going in. On the Macbook the super drive has hardly been used and is almost new. Never has a disc been inserted into it. I plan to swap the two drives which means that i want to take out the drive from the MB and install it in my MBP and vice versa. Can anyone advise if this is possible.The Apple Service Center claims this is not possible as they have different slots. I am not sure that makes sense. So can anyone advise on this, please!

The units themselves have slightly different housings - I don't think the one from the MB will physically fit in the MBP.

Corrupt hard-drive, swapped for an older drive from another similar MacBook Pro

My original hard drive is corrupt, I swapped to an older drive which has snow lepoard on it, when installing Yosemite it freezes now i cant boot into the old OS and installer freezes extracting.
Disk utility says the disk is fine, with no issues.
The original disk failed and would not boot, disk utility says it was corrupt. I have another MacBook pro so i swapped the HD's, it is 320GB compared to the 500GB (failed drive).
It was working fine on Snow Leopard but when I ran the upgrade in the App Store, it freezes everytime at the same point in the install ( extracting the same .pkg file).
Any ideas?

You apparently have a MBP that came with an OSX newer than Snow Leopard. If that is the case, the Snow Leopard HDD will not boot in the newer MBP. If you erase that HDD and install the OSX that came with your MBP (or a newer one), then it will be compatible.
Ciao.

T400 hard drive swap

I have two T400s.
One unit has continuous issues, the other unit hasn't seen constant use yet.
If I swap hard drives between the two units, will it nullify the warranty?

SpringerITC wrote:
I have two T400s.
One unit has continuous issues, the other unit hasn't seen constant use yet.
If I swap hard drives between the two units, will it nullify the warranty?
you can swap or take out the hdd, ram, wireless card, etc without affecting the warranty on the laptop.
Regards,
Jin Li
May this year, be the year of 'DO'!
I am a volunteer, and not a paid staff of Lenovo or Microsoft

Hard Drive Swaps

Hello!
I have a new hard drive that I want to put into my iMac, only I have a slight dilemma. I bought the iMac off eBay and it didn't come with the installation disks. Is there anyway I can swap the hard drives and get it running without those disks?
Thanks!

Get an external hard drive case empty. Put the new drive in it. Clone the internal drive to external drive (using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper). Swap the drives. That's about it.
Instead of the external drive case, you can get one of these.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/U2NV2SPATA/
(EDIT: Actually, I just realized this was being posted in the +iMac (CRT)+ category. Is that the iMac type you have? If so, what's the OS on it? And does it have a FireWire port? Depending on the iMac model, some of what I wrote may not apply... and there may be other considerations.)
Better yet. Get a FireWire external case (FireWire 800 if your iMac has a FireWire 800 port). Use your new drive externally. No need to open up your iMac and do warranty-voiding surgery (if it's still under warranty or AppleCare). Keep using your internal drive for the OS and apps. Off-load most of your data (such as your +iTunes Music+ folder) to the external drive.
That's my setup, plus a really large USB 2.0 external drive to backup my internal drive and FireWire drive using Time Machine. Works exceptionally well.
FYI - You should have a Mac OS X installation disc, so you can run repairs on your startup volume and do a reinstall if necessary.

17" G4 Super Drive swap out problem.

I swapped out my old superdrive in my 17" G4 with a working one from a 17" MacBook Pro. It fits and the cable connects fine. The Powerbook now just beeps when I turn it on and does not power up. Is there something else I need to do to get the G4 to recognize the drive?

I would think it is the same compatibility problem you would have swapping a Windows PC drive with an Apple drive. Powerbooks are PPC and MacBook Pros are Intel procesors.

13" (unibody) to 15" i7 hard drive swap

This may be a dumb question -but can I just swap drives? I tried the time machine thing last time and it ended with me having to take two days (literally -like 23 hrs!) reinstalling my sound files. If I just swap the drive will it mess up the computer?

Ah! Meaning you want the 13" drive in the 15" for other reasons too, beyond apparent transfer speed!
One option would be to put the 13" drive in the 15" and then boot from 15" OS DVDs to simply install the new OS on the older, faster, drive, with it in the 15".
Alternatively, you could attach the 13" to the 15" with a Firewire cable, boot the 13" in FW target disc mode, and install the new OS on it using the 15" DVds , and then swap the drives.
Cheers
Rod

Drive swap

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for