Startup disk confusion after copy

[jerry-built]

I make a copy of my startup disk on an internal hard drive. When I restart the computer it sometimes starts up on the copy (and it is difficult to tell when this happens because it is an identical copy). Any idea how to stop this?

 

Mac Pro

OS X 10.6.3

Retrospect v 8.1

[Daniels]

Have you tried disconnecting the copied hard drive and see if the computer boots up using the original?

It sounds like the machine is booting off the first disk it finds so depending on how the drives are connected in the machine you can try setting one to slave and one to master and see which one it uses.

[Maser]

Which drive is selected in the "Startup Disk" system preference?

 

I've seen machines where no disk is selected, but usually you see a quick flash on screen at startup indicating that the computer has to think about what boot disk to select.

[CallMeDave]

You can hold the Option key at bootup to get the firmware startup volume selection.

 

If your two volumes have different icons you'll be able to tell them apart.

 

Otherwise you should rename one of them after the Copy but before you restart.

[scsctech]

+1 for Maser

 

Select the correct drive in System Preferences>Startup Disk

[jerry-built]

Thanks everyone for your replies. The correct startup disk is selected in System Preferences. The drive is internal so the only way I could disconnect it is by removing it. The two disks do have different names. The startup disk is disk0 in bay 1. The copy is disk2 in bay 1 (from system profiler). I do not know how to set master and slave disks in Mac OS X. Incidentally, I don't now think this is a retrospect issue. I had the same problem when I used carbon copy cloner to make the copy.

[Daniels]

I was talking about the jumper settings on the drives themselves.

[jerry-built]

I am not sure if you can do this with Serial ATA drives.

[Daniels]

You can not set jumpers with SATA drives but you can set the device IDs.

[CallMeDave]

When I restart the computer it sometimes starts up on the copy (and it is difficult to tell when this happens because it is an identical copy)

 

There is an ongoing discussion right now on MacInTouch about this very issue. It's not a Retrospect issue per-se, as your Macintosh will only try so hard to boot from the selected disk, and will then boot from any other valid disk it can.

 

The idea of "unblessing" the system sounds like the most fault-tolerant solution, however no one has offered a way to actually _do_ that.

 

If you are doing "Matching" copies, where only changed files are copied over, you might be able to put a custom (and obvious) desktop background on the clone system so if that drive does boot up there will be no mistaking it.

 

you can try setting one to slave and one to master

-snip-

I was talking about the jumper settings on the drives themselves.

- snip-

You can not set jumpers with SATA drives but you can set the device IDs.

Probably best to just ignore the above.

[jerry-built]

Thanks for this. Do you have a direct link to thread on MacInTouch?

[Daniels]

The link is provided in callmeDave's post.