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frogtaco
02-20-2009, 08:18 PM
How do I keep my MacBook Pro from ever booting from the backup unless I specifically ask it to? I don't know if SuperDuper is to blame, but I just figured out that a few days ago when my computer restarted it booted from the firewire drive instead of the internal disk. No wonder my backups have been failing...

I'm running 10.4.11, if it matters.

Thanks!

dnanian
02-20-2009, 11:19 PM
Well, you need to ensure that your options don't set the backup drive as the startup drive, nor start up from it.

Otherwise, the only thing that could cause this is an internal drive that isn't responding as it should. In that case, the BIOS (EFI/OpenFirmware) would look for and start up from the next available bootable device...

frogtaco
02-20-2009, 11:38 PM
Well, you need to ensure that your options don't set the backup drive as the startup drive, nor start up from it.

Thanks for your response! You're referring to SuperDuper backup job options, correct? They definitely don't include Reboot From Backup or however it's phrased.

Otherwise, the only thing that could cause this is an internal drive that isn't responding as it should. In that case, the BIOS (EFI/OpenFirmware) would look for and start up from the next available bootable device...

I've had this happen on both my iMac G5 and my MacBook Pro since implementing SuperDuper with external backup drives. Are you suspecting the internal drives might be thinking about failing?

Thanks!

dnanian
02-21-2009, 07:21 AM
Easier to expand here than on Twitter. :)

Yes, I'm talking about the "Options..." button. In general, the "On successful completion" option should be "Do Nothing".

Note that, if misconfigured, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell from the "What's going to happen?" section of the Scheduled Copies window, because it's not as detailed as the real one.

What you can do is use File > Load Settings... to open ~/Library/Application Support/SuperDuper!/Scheduled Copies/your-schedule-settings. Once loaded, look in Options and see if you have something set there. If so, quit SD!, restart it, delete the schedule and recreate with "Do Nothing".

frogtaco
02-21-2009, 02:43 PM
I verified that the current backup scheme only has "Finally SuperDuper! will quit" at the end. And then I deleted it and recreated it, just to be safe.

I do suspect that maybe when I was setting up SD originally I tested it out with a restart and boot from backup at the end to make sure it worked, without following up by checking the Startup Disk prefs after setting up the backup the way I really wanted it. Would SD have changed that Startup Disk option on my behalf back when I was testing it out? Or does it cause a reboot from backup in some other way?

dnanian
02-21-2009, 03:19 PM
That would have set the backup drive as your startup drive, certainly. If you didn't change it back, it wouldn't have changed itself back.

frogtaco
02-21-2009, 04:19 PM
That would have set the backup drive as your startup drive, certainly. If you didn't change it back, it wouldn't have changed itself back.

I wish it had been clearer that that particular setting needed to be manually switched back in the Preference Pane, when I made the change through the program.

Thanks for helping me get to the bottom of this! I love SuperDuper, and wish I'd had it before my iMac's hard drive crashed. I won't run a Mac without it now, and can't recommend it enough to other Mac users.

dnanian
02-21-2009, 05:23 PM
There's a limit, alas, of how much general Mac "tutorial" information I can provide around this kind of thing. Of course, to boot back to the internal drive, you would use the Startup Disk preference pane, so that would reset the setting...

frogtaco
02-21-2009, 07:02 PM
There's a limit, alas, of how much general Mac "tutorial" information I can provide around this kind of thing. Of course, to boot back to the internal drive, you would use the Startup Disk preference pane, so that would reset the setting...

That makes sense. I figured it out right away on my iMac because the Firewire drive is always attached. (And then I forgot all about it.)

On the MBP we weren't always remembering to connect the external drive after moving the computer, so when it restarted without the external one attached, it would boot from the internal disk, since the default one wasn't available. We restart so seldom that the issue was harder to track down.

Thanks again for your help!

dnanian
02-21-2009, 11:32 PM
Glad it all makes some sense now!