carnage

Installing Tiger if you don't have a DVD drive.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger now comes on a single DVD by default. While this is more convenient than the disc-swapping required by the 3 Panther CDs, it's tricky if you're trying to install Tiger onto an older machine that does not have a DVD drive.

I found an article by Jaharmi describing FireWire Target Mode (which I've also gone over) and a new technique involving using an external FireWire drive to create a dedicated partition that is a Tiger DVD disk image. Basically, you use Disk Utility to Restore the DVD to a spare partition you don't mind erasing. Handy if you have an extra FireWire drive lying around. I tried it this morning, and discovered a few things:

• The process requires you to erase a partition on your FireWire drive. This may require some thinking ahead.
• If you create a new partition, make sure you're generous in allocating space. Disk Utility will select the next lowest convenient number (based on the 1k = 1012 bytes formula, I expect) even if you try to get clever with your partitioning. The Tiger DVD takes up around 2.5 GB, so I tried to allocate just above that. The Restore process failed partway through, saying that there was some kind of file error. Giving the partition a full 4GB did the trick.
• If the Restore process does fail, both the source and destination volumes will remain unmounted. The visual indicator for this is pretty subtle (the volume names are greyed out in the list on the left, generally where you aren't looking) and you might be puzzled because further attempts to Restore will give you a "file not found" sort of error. The solution is to re-mount the target drive partition, and then use the File menu to eject the source DVD. Re-insert the DVD and it will mount.

The point of all this was to see if I could install Tiger onto my Wallstreet PowerBook via XPostFacto, which only has a CD drive. My quick experimentation with the new Tiger/FireWire partition described above resulted in a kernel panic. I'll have to look into this further, but for now I think the answer might be to send away for the Tiger CDs (see the "Media Exchange Program" box in the right column).

A good site about RAID.

AC&NC has published a nice light reference site for all the various types of RAID configurations out there. RAID, which stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, involves hooking together a bunch of smaller (and usually cheaper) drives, rather than relying on one massive (expensive) drive. Depending on your configuration, you can get substantial speed gains, fault-tolerant storage, or both.

The tutorial walks you through the basic characteristics of each configuration scheme, with an illustration of how the drives and data are related. Beneath each picture is a brief explanation of the set-up, and a list of advantages of disadvantages.

Right now I'm evaluating between RAID 1 and RAID 5 for my future, "once and for all" data bank project. More on that later.

AN&NC's "RAID.edu" tutorial site

G-SAFE.

I just got turned on to G-Technologies, who appear to make "professional strength," highly-engineered storage products. They appear to be setting their sites squarely on LaCie. All of their stuff looks like it's made of aluminum, and they have some innovative features, like cooling fins on their fanless drive cases.

They've just announced the G-SAFE, which is a 2-drive RAID 1 array, which means you get the much safer mirroring, rather than the higher speed and capacity (but zero redundancy) of RAID 0. (I'm just now really learning about RAID these days, and will have a more complete rundown of the various options soon.)

They don't have a page on their site yet; just a PDF. The G-SAFE is supposed to be on sale now, but I can't find it anywhere. It starts at $499.

G-Technologies G-SAFE brochure PDF

Thanks, Goldie!

New drives for the laptops.

I was planning on getting a new hard drive for the Titanium anyway, but I was going to take that old drive out and put it into the Wallstreet, since it was quite a bit bigger (20GB vs. 4GB) and ran quieter. It would have made a great drive to try installing Tiger on, via XPostFacto. Unfortunately, it's about to die, so I went hunting for not one, but two new laptop drives.

Chris helped me get a price check on some drives, and ultimately I went for couple of 60GB 5400rpm Western Digital Scorpio drives for $80 bucks from the Dell Small Business store, which I found through dealmac. Total damage: $175 shipped. Not bad, but not as good as the $20 Western Digital 80GB desktop drives I scored last week from Best Buy.

S.M.A.R.T.

I was all set to install Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) on my 15" Titanium PowerBook G4 last night. I decided to run Disk Utility off of the install disc, just in case, and guess what it found? The 20GB drive inside was in the process of failing. Disk Utility alerted me by displaying the drive's name in red text, and filling the right-hand side of the window with a mildly scary message telling me that my drive was failing and that if possible, I should salvage my data and replace the drive:

Disk Utility wouldn't let me do anything else to the drive, either. No permissions repair or other First Aid procedures. Hard core.

I did some digging, and apparently all newer hard drives come with something called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology), which is a self-diagnostic protocol that a drive will run regularly to track things like bad blocks and even mechanical and electronic components.

Cool. I wish it told me automatically, instead of me having to discover it like this. I now wonder if issues on my laptop drive had anything to do with The Crash of 2005, which happened when I was cloning said laptop's drive to my big FireWire drive.

UPDATE Even though it wouldn't let me run Disk Utility, the Tiger Installer Disc let me upgrade to Tiger. Go figure. Of note: Disk Utility 10.4.4 (the version that ships with Panther) and Disk Utility 10.5 (Tiger) handle failing drives differently—10.4.4 won't give you the red text and foreboding message shown above.