OS 10.4.9 - RAID - External Firewire Striping questions

Hello,
I have an Apple XServe running 10.4.9 Server, serving a handful of Apple 10.4 clients. We were looking to add inexpensive storage to this server, so we purchased three Lacie External BigDisk Extreme Firewire drives, daisy chained them together via Firewire connections, and set them up as a striped RAID set using Disk Utility. This setup has worked very well for us for the last six months.
Yesterday, one of the three external drives began acting up. Upon further investigation, the drive was making a "clicking" noise, and was sporadically coming on and offline. As soon as this happened, the raid slice got marked offline, and subsequently the entire RAID volume was marked offline.
After rebooting the server several times and power cycling the externals, I am unable to get the RAID volume to come back online. If I view the RAID volume properties in Disk Utility, the RAID set is marked offline. The bad drive is marked as "Failed," and the slices on the two remaining good drives report "Offline". There was a brief period of about five minutes where the misbehaving external drive started acting right, and I was able to mount the RAID volume and verify the data was intact. Shortly thereafter, the drive acted up again, the RAID went offline again, and this is where I am now.
Side note: We have a fourth, identical external drive sitting to the side, unused.
Is there a way for me to add this spare drive to the server, add it to the RAID set, and initiate a rebuild? It seems the "Auto-rebuild" option was not checked during the initial creation of the volume, and I did not change it, pending further review.
Any insight or suggestions on this matter are greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
JT

This is why you shouldn't use striped volumes for server storage. I don't even like using firewire drives for that.
A RAID 0 doesn't have redundancy so a rebuild isn't possible.
Maybe if you could copy the content of the failed drive to a new drive with block copy using dd or something (a drive in a stripe-set doesn't have regular partition, files or filesystem) you might be able to save the RAID. But if the drive "clicks" that is probably very hard. It could be the powersupply acting up in the failed drive enclosure. Maybe try moving it to another one.
If you need a big volume a concatenated disk set is a better choice and a hardware RAID controller (RAID 5 or better) is even better.
Some larger firewire drives are really a hardware striped volume from two or more drives in the enclosure - same thing, if one physical drive acts up the whole volume crash.

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Keep in mind a RAID 1 only protects you from hardware failure of one of the drives. It does not protect you if the hardware raid/chip set decides to take a vacation. Also, if FCP corrupts a file, it is written as corrupt to both drives.
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x

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Hi Forum,
after some installations (OS 10.4.9, latest security update and Qucktime 7.1.6 I canot boot from my external disk (Lacie) connected to FireWire 800 port. The Apple shows up but then nothing more happens. Does anyone have a hint?
Thanks
Oliver

Add me to the list also. I had an external firewire disk as a RAID mirror for my boot disk. After a system crash (and some problem with my internal disk) I couldn't boot from the firewire stripe. This used to work.
I've tried creating a single-disk "degraded RAID pair" on the external disk and cloning the internal disk to it (using Disk Utility "Restore"). The cloning works fine but I can't boot from the copy. This is how I originally set up the RAID pair (clone, boot from clone, add internal disk to RAID group). This used to work. I bought a new firewire disk and it has exactly the same problems.
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Cannot boot Snow Leopard from external FireWire drive

I use a Western Digital My Passport Studio 500 GB external drive to back up my MacBook Pro with Time Machine. I had created a 30 GB Leopard boot partition with various utilities and tools; since the small drive goes wherever the laptop goes, I figured it might come in handy to be able to boot the computer in the event something went wrong with its internal 250 GB drive.
Over the weekend, I upgraded the external drive to Snow Leopard, and now it can no longer be used to boot the laptop. The symptoms are truly weird. Holding down the Option key while rebooting does not show the external drive unless I disconnect and reconnect the FireWire cable. The drive then shows up. I select it, and it appears to begin to boot, then it just sits on the gray screen with the little round thingie turning for a long time (five to ten minutes). Eventually, the system boots from its internal drive. This happens regardless of whether I'm connected by means of FireWire 400 or 800.
After spending a lot of time looking at the usual suspects (cables, permissions, PRAM, etc.) I reinstalled Sand Leopard (OK, 10.5) and lo and behold, the drive boots again (though for some reason I still have to go through the disconnect/reconnect routine). Clearly, something in the OS has changed with respect to the way booting from external drives is handled.
On the positive side, I have none of the symptoms described in other threads: Time Machine works flawlessly, and both the boot partition and the Time Machine partition appear on the Snow Leopard desktop every time I connect the drive.
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Daniel

Hi,
Working from a MacBook Pro 2.4 (Santa Rosa) with 4gb ram, running OS 10.5.7-
(All external HDs are 7200 rpm)
Shortly after our fresh install of Snow Leopard onto a new but already tested External 1.5 Seagate Barracuda (with the most current firmware), in an OWC Mercury Elite enclosure-
We installed Snow Leopard smoothly to that external HD without any issues, and it booted up from that 1.5T external HD, and worked fine.
Then, still working from the MacBook Pro, I turned on and booted another external HD (a Newertech Guardian Maximus RAID running 10.4.11 via FW800, daisy chained to the 1.5T External with Snow Leopard newly installed.
Again that's MacBook Pro <FW800> Snowy external HD <FW800> 10.4.11 RAID (booted & working from the RAID).
But when I tried to bootup up Snow Leopard, after doing the work on the 10.4.11 RAID-
It would not boot up.
Though Snowy would appear as an available Start Up disk, each time it was selected as the Boot drive,
the Internal HD OS 10.5.7 booted instead.
I changed around the cables and tried repeatedly.
Same result, no Snowy boot.
Even after the OS 10.4.11 external RAID was power down, and disconnected.
After some looking around, I found this forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2136208&tstart=0
Got me thinking.
I tried the USB, and it booted !
I tried the FW400, and it booted !
And mysteriously, at this point- I tried the FW800, and it booted !
And then, the MBP boots seemed to reliably boot from that external, via FW800.
Bizarre.
Snow Cat needs to be taught originally how to find FW800 from the bottom up ?
Turns out, Snow Leopard doesn't like booting,
if the preceding boot was on the 10.4.11 RAID, and work was done with programs there.
So, once again, I repeated this process:
After working with programs on the 10.4.11 external HD,
the MBP would not boot the Snow Leopard external HD,
it defaulted to booting from the MBP internal HD OS 10.5 via FW800.
even though Snowy was selected for Start Up.
This was the case repeatedly.
(It would also boot from the 10.4.11 external RAID, if it were selected for Start Up.)
(In each of these tests below, I only rebooted the computer at each test. I did no work with programs on the various HDs.)
SO, once again, at this point of the process:
I plugged in that Snowy external HD via FW400,
and it booted up fine !
Then I booted up from the Internal 10.5, and tried to boot Snowy via FW800 again.
It worked !
Then I turned on the 10.4.11 RAID external HD, and tried to reboot from the Snowy external HD.
It worked too !
Then I booted from the 10.4.11 RAID, it came up fine.
Then booted from the Snowy, it came up fine.
Then booted from the Internal HD 10.5, it came up fine.
Then booted from Snowy again, it came up fine.
Then I turned off the 10.4.11 HD, booted from Snowy, it came up fine.
Then booted from the Internal, it came up fine.
Then tried Snowy one last time, it came up fine.
Anyway, the issue is:
It works fine-
Except when I do work within the programs on the 10.4.11 external RAID.
Then I have to use FW400 or USB to get it to boot once again . . .
Regardless of whether the other external HD is removed from the system.
It's some sort of flaw, and totally repeatable in testing.
Hopefully, it will be fixed soon.
Howard

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<http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html>
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Hi Kappy,
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Hi Dale,
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Is it possible to detach an external firewire BOOT disk during sleep?

Hi,
I have an aging PowerBook G4 17 inch (3 years and 3 months) which is still good and fast enough for my needs. Last year the display and motherboard were changed which cost me some money so I would like to hold on to it for one or two more years. Yesterday I suddenly heard a strange noise coming from the hard disk and the Finder and Disk Utility ran extremely slow afterwards for some time. I shut it down, waited a couple of hours and now everything seems to be normal. I take it the hard disk might soon die (Toshiba make, more than 3 years old, a lot of graphics work requiring disk activity). Or 1° I replace the internal hard disk or 2) I buy an external firewire disk to boot from (which I can continue using afterwards if the laptop goes dead). I am leaning towards the second solution. However I would like to know:
1. Is it good behavior to put the computer to sleep, detach the hard disk (from which I booted) and attach it before waking it again? This would make it easy to transport it. I did a test and it seems to work however one test might not be conclusive...
2. Would my system be as fast as with an internal one (assuming I buy an external FireWire 800)?
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
PS: what is the average life of a PowerBook? The sales guy from a local Apple shop told me that after 4 years any Mac is good for the trash.

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The guy in the shop was trying to sell you a new Mac, there are people out there still using 10+ year old Macs!

Booting Windows on Intel Mac from an external Firewire/USB hard disk?

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No.

OS 10.4.9 - RAID - External Firewire Striping questions

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