Unable to boot-up from a concatenated RAID set

[Philip playfer]

I have a Mac pro (running Leopard 10.5.2) which in addition to my 750 GB hard drive contains two additional 300 GB hard drives. I have combined these two hard drives into a concatenated RAID set using Apple disk utility and backup my main hard drive to this disk using SuperDuper.

I have not tried to boot up from this RAID set for a while now, however, when I tried yesterday I was repeatedly unable to do so. The machine just crashed at start-up and I had to do an emergency restart. I have been able to boot from this set in the past. I would be grateful if anybody can help with this problem. I have been using SuperDuper for quite some time now as part of my backup routine, and it has been a real life saver in the past.

[dnanian]

Two things. First, make sure you've done the 'fix' at the top of this forum. Second, in Terminal, run:

sudo bless --folder "/Volumes/your-backup-volume/System/Library/CoreServices" --bootinfo --bootefi

substituting your volume name appropriately. Press Return at the end of the line, type your password (which will be invisible) and press Return again. Then try booting.

[Philip playfer]

No luck I'm afraid! I tried both the things that you suggested and upon startup I still got the 'grey international screen of start-up death' telling me that I have to restart the computer by holding down the emergency start-up key. Have you any other suggestions?

The only thing that was different to your instructions was that when I was in terminal it automatically asked for my password after I had entered the script and before I was able to press return. As a result I just typed my password as requested and then pressed return. You'll have to forgive me I know very little about working within terminal.

One other thing that is perhaps worth mentioning is that when I held the alt key, upon restarting the computer, in addition to my main hard disk the RAID came up as two separate discs one named RAID 1 and the other as RAID 2. Only RAID 1 was selected as the start-up disk. This may be normal, I don't know?

[dnanian]

Well, that's a kernel panic. I'm not sure what would be causing the panic, but if you can send me the panic log from /Library/Logs on the backup drive, I can try to see what it's complaining about. Send it to the support email address.

[Philip playfer]

Thank you Dave for your help on and off forum! The problem seems to be sorted. I had to take the rather drastic step of reformatting the two drives and redoing the RAID set. I then reinstalled Leopard, carrying out all the necessary updates. I did this just to check that it was possible to boot from the concatenated RAID set. Having satisfied myself that this was okay, I then did a smart update using SuperDuper making sure that the "fix_prebinding.sh" was set up to run at the end of the copy. The result of all this is that I can now boot from the RAID disk. Again many thanks for your help!

[dnanian]

Glad to hear it!