Hi all,
Working late tonight. This is my second attempt at a server hard disk upgrade for our “IT box” that serves Wikis, handles e-mail, and processing user logins. If you are thinking this box does too many things, I totally agree. We’re going to split up services later this month when we get a new box.
My hope was to clone the primary hard drive on top of a bigger hard drive. The first time I tried Carbon Copy Cloner (great program). The image worked perfectly, but I made the mistake of partitioning the new drive under Snow Leopard. By default, Disk Utility uses “GUID Partition Table”, which will not boot on the Mac Pro G5 Tower that we are using (older Macs use Apple Partition Map).
This time, I decided to try Disk Utility. I dragged ServerHD to the “source” area, and put the new drive in the destination. After 45 minutes, I returned to a “read/write error”.
At first, I thought “oh well, I’ll try again later”, but I started to get worried when Disk Utility couldn’t see the original disk anymore. It complained that “the disk isn’t mounted” so I restarted the computer. It wouldn’t boot up… Tried again, no luck. I got a flashing Globe icon that I’m assuming means “trying to network boot”.
My heart sank in my chest. I immediately decided to grab the machine and take it back to my office. Luckily, for some strange reason it worked over here. I had hooked up an external, bootable (not really… we partitioned it as GUID too, ugh) hard drive.
Now I have it running and I am using Carbon Copy Cloner live on the boot volume. I’ll get everything backed up and put it back tomorrow morning. Whew! I’m running into all those errors you read about but don’t dream you’ll see. We do have backups, luckily, but I’m thinking I will make it out when I wanted to leave.
Wish me luck UCI and the world 