Startup disk copy oddity

[prl]

I have a Retro 8 script to make a copy of my internal startup volume to a volume on an external Firewire HD.

 

If I boot from my internal startup volume, System Preferences>Startup Disk shows my internal startup volume, but not the external one.

 

If I hold dowm Option at startup, the boot-time boot volume selection shows both the internal and external startup volumes as available to boot from, and I can successfully boot from the external startup volume.

 

If I boot this way from my external startup volume, System Preferences>Startup Disk shows both the internal and external startup volumes.

 

What's going on here?

 

Retrospect 8.1.626 + Driver Update 8.1.1.103

OS X 10.6.3

MacBook Pro 2.26GHz

[CallMeDave]

If I boot this way from my external startup volume, System Preferences>Startup Disk shows both the internal and external startup volumes.

 

If you select the internal again, and allow it to boot into the internal again, (without further Retrospect activity) does the Startup Disk preference pane still not show the valid external volume?

 

What is the partition table of the external hard drive?

[prl]

If I boot this way from my external startup volume, System Preferences>Startup Disk shows both the internal and external startup volumes.

 

If you select the internal again, and allow it to boot into the internal again, (without further Retrospect activity) does the Startup Disk preference pane still not show the valid external volume?

No, it still only shows the internal startup volume.

 

What is the partition table of the external hard drive?

Internal is GUID partition table, external is MBR.

 

Thanks

[Maser]

I wonder if the copied drive didn't get "blessed" properly.

 

What if you try this:

 

% sudo bless -folder /Volumes/TARGET VOLUME NAME/System/Library/CoreServices

 

And/or try this:

 

option-boot the external drive again and run a "repair permissions" on the drive to see if that changes anything?

 

And...

 

What if you change the name of the hard disk of the external drive? Does that make any difference when the internal drive boots?

[CallMeDave]

...external is MBR...

 

- If the disk were partitioned as GUID and the same steps performed would it behave the same way?

 

- If you were to install OS X from original media (assuming the OS X installer will allow installing to a MBR partitioned disk) would it behave the same way?

[prl]

I wonder if the copied drive didn't get "blessed" properly.

 

What if you try this:

 

% sudo bless -folder /Volumes/TARGET VOLUME NAME/System/Library/CoreServices

 

And/or try this:

 

option-boot the external drive again and run a "repair permissions" on the drive to see if that changes anything?

 

And...

 

What if you change the name of the hard disk of the external drive? Does that make any difference when the internal drive boots?

 

(Re-) blessing the external drive copy changes nothing. Repairing Permissions on the external drive copy changes nothing, but Verify Permissions (run before Repair Permissions) reports a large number of permission errors. However, I get similar errors if I run Verify Permissions on the internal disk, so those errors may not be significant.

 

More alarmingly, though, is that after doing a copy, I get an "Incorrect number of file hard links" error on Verify Disk on the copy. If I Repair Disk, it reports about 40 "Orphaned file inode (id = ...)" errors. If I run Repair Disk, then do the Retrospect Copy again, the orphan inodes are back when I do a Verify/Repair Disk after the copy. The internal disk reports no errors on Verify Disk.

 

This doesn't look as though the copy is working properly, so I'm going to go back to using the slower, but apparently more reliable Deja Vu (psync wrapper) to back up my system disk.

 

By the way, why does the option in the destination tab for selecting an identical copy call it "Overwrite entire volume" with a warning "Destination will be erased before copying" when it appears to do an incremental copy/delete, not erase all/copy all? Similarly for the "Are you sure you want to erase the entire source before copying?" warning when you run the script?

 

CallMeDave: I think I'll wait until the Copy operation can actually create a copy without file system errors before I investigate the effect of the partition table on whether the copied volume appears in the Startup Disk panel in System Preferences. I don't have a spare disk to experiment with at the moment, anyway.

 

Edited April 18, 2010 by Guest

[Maser]

FWIW -- having never done this, I tried it last night with 8.1.626.

 

Booted my 10.6.3 server box (doubt the fact that it's a server box makes a difference, but...)

 

Hooked up an external USB hard disk. Reformatted the hard disk with Disk Utility (GUID partition -- named "Untitled" after reformat)

 

Did a basic "copy" script from the internal (which is running the engine) to the USB drive.

 

When done, the USB drive showed as bootable in System Preferences *and* could boot.

 

 

Ran "verify disk" on the booted "Untitled" disk -- no problems like you reported.

 

 

I can't believe this is a difference between 10.6.3 "server" and "client".

 

Something else is going on with your attempt, but I'm not sure what to suggest.

 

 

 

[CallMeDave]

His steps differ from yours in the partition scheme.

 

I don't know enough about Master Boot Record partitions to formulate an informed suspicion, but my gut is hungry to know how the startup disk preference pane is expected to behave with OS X installed on such a drive.

[prl]

His steps differ from yours in the partition scheme.

 

I don't know enough about Master Boot Record partitions to formulate an informed suspicion, but my gut is hungry to know how the startup disk preference pane is expected to behave with OS X installed on such a drive.

If the OpenFirmware environment can discover the boot volume on the MBR partition, why not the preference pane?

[Maser]

OpenFirmware can boot from anything (just about) -- even a Linux partition if you set it up right. As a test a few years ago, I set up a "triple boot" laptop (Mac, Windows, RedHat)

 

But said Linux partition wasn't be available as a startup disk in the System Preference, either. The System Preference may be coded not to show certain formatted drives.

[prl]

OpenFirmware can boot from anything (just about) -- even a Linux partition if you set it up right. As a test a few years ago, I set up a "triple boot" laptop (Mac, Windows, RedHat)

 

But said Linux partition wasn't be available as a startup disk in the System Preference, either. The System Preference may be coded not to show certain formatted drives.

Thanks Maser. I need to have MBR on this drive because I sometimes connect it to a PVR (it has some partitions on it the PVR can handle), and for that it needs to be MBR. I can live with selecting the drive from OpenFirmware. It's an "Emergency Boot" drive, so if I used it in earnest, I'd probably be selecting it from OpenFirmware anyway.

 

I'm now actually more concerned by the fact that Retrospect Copy can't seem to create a "clean" copy of my drive (see my post about orphaned inodes above).

[Maser]

I'm not sure about what made your machine different as it worked for me..

 

 

What if you try to use SuperDuper and/or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a copy of your hard disk to the external? Do you get the same inode issues?

[prl]

I'm not sure about what made your machine different as it worked for me..

 

 

What if you try to use SuperDuper and/or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a copy of your hard disk to the external? Do you get the same inode issues?

I tried doing the copy using Deja Vu (psync wrapper), and it also caused problems with orphan inodes.

 

While this has been going on, my Mac seems to have gone a bit flaky on me. X11 stopped starting up, possibly induced by the 10.6.3 update or the recent 2010-3 security update. I tried to fix it by installing the 10.6.3 combo, and that seemed to fix the X11 problem.

 

However, when I tried to do a clean erase/Retro 8 Copy to the external volume, I got > 3000 errors, almost all complaining that soft links on the source hadn't copied correctly. When I had a look at the original and copy, the link had been copied as an empty file. The errors were all in /Developer (in Xcode). Also, some other binaries had become empty, /usr/bin/man, in particular (it was a symbolic link pointing to an empty file).

 

So I decided that I should do a clean re-install of OS X (and consequently Retrospect). I'm in the middle of that. The OS X installer refuses to install onto the partitions on the external HDD with an MBR, so it looks as though boot is only really supported properly on GUID Partition Tables.

 

When I've re-installed, I'll give it all another try and see how it goes, and post here.

 

Thanks to those who've tried to help.

[CallMeDave]

I tried doing the copy using Deja Vu (psync wrapper), and it also caused problems with orphan inodes.

OK, that pretty much proves Retrospect is not/was not causing a problem with inodes in its Copy operation.

 

The OS X installer refuses to install onto the partitions on the external HDD with an MBR...

OK, that pretty much proves Retrospect is not/was not causing a problem with the Startup Disk preference pane's disk selection behavior.

 

 

 

Dave

[prl]

CallMeDave, agreed on both points.

 

I've since re-installed OS X, and done an erase/Retro 8 copy to the external HDD. The copy had no problems when I did a Verify Disk on it. This confirms that the orphan inode problems weren't due to Retrospect.

 

I still have no idea about what caused the meltdown.

 

Thanks again to Maser and CallMeDave.

[prl]

OK, the erase/copy went fine, but I've now done an incremental copy (no erase first) from the system drive to its copy. I got 104 errors, a few of them understandable ones given that the copy was from an active file system.

 

However, all the others were like this:

*File "/Volumes/Cambyses/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Classes/dt.jar": appears incomplete

>

*File "/Volumes/Cambyses/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Classes/management-agent.jar": appears incomplete

>

*File "/Volumes/Cambyses/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home/lib/ext/dnsns.jar": appears incomplete

>

*File "/Volumes/Cambyses/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home/lib/security/local_policy.jar": appears incomplete

>

Most of the filenames were of files like the ones I've included, that is, files I wouldn't normally expect to change during a copy. When I extracted all the filenames from the "appears incomplete" error messages, and ran a loop using the Unix "cmp" binary file compare program between the source file and the copy, there were compare errors in only two out of the 93 "appears incomplete" files. Those two were files in /Volumes/Cambyses/private/var, where I'd expect that files might change during the copy.

 

I also did an "ls -l" between the source file and its copy, and a quick eyeball check also didn't reveal any differences apart from modification time.

 

So why all the error messages?

 

There were no errors in a Verify Disk of the copied disk.