Random Booting on MAC pro with 2 harddrives
 

Hello!

I just realized that my mac booting from a different HD every time I restart the system. I have a mac pro with 2 HD, one 250gig in bay 1 and 500 gig in bay 2.

I copied bay1 250gig on bay2 500gig and made 500gig bootable just in case first one dies.

Now it boots sometimes from bay 1 drive sometimes form bay 2, I just realized it cause I had different desktop background set to change every day, and thought that it was same HD boot but diff wallpaper, now I realize it boots sometimes from hd1 sometimes from hd2.

When I removed bay2 drive, it boots from bay1 drive with no problem.

Anyone knows if its ok to have 2 bootable HD inside one computer?

should I make bay2 drive non bootable?

Thank you all for help!

alexei

Did you accidentally set SuperDuper! to set the drive as your startup drive in its Options?

no, i dont think so.. right now I set it up to copy just the user files, where do I make a choice to make it bootable or not? is it made bootable by default?

I remember there was a choice to make it bootable or not..cant find it now..

Thanks!

First, SuperDuper! will always try to make it possible to boot a destination volume if the source volume was bootable. This does not mean that the machine will automatically boot from such a destination volume later, just that it will be possible to do so through either the System Preferences Startup Disk panel or booting with Option held down.

That said, the option Dave was talking about can be found from the main window: click the Options… button, in the General tab, for the On successful completion pop-up list, choosing either Restart from <target> or Set <target> as Startup Disk will cause SuperDuper! to change which volume is the default startup volume.


Currently, I have no internal drive in my system and just an external Firewire drive with 3 bootable partitions. I have found that although I have one of those volumes set to be the default startup volume, sometimes another volume is actually booted. I think it had something to do with the Firewire drive being spun down (though powered on) when I tried to boot my machine. Imagine this sequence of events:

Your system is powered up.
Both internal drives get power and start spinning-up and initializing.
The firmware goes through its early self-tests and initializations.
The drive in “bay 2” becomes ready.
The firmware is ready to boot the OS.
The firmware looks for its configured startup volume on the “bay 1” disk. It can not access that disk because it is not yet ready.
The firmware does find a bootable volume on the “bay 2” disk, however. Lacking any other alternative, it boots the volume from the “bay 2” disk. ★
The drive in “bay 1” becomes ready, but the firmware has already started booting from a volume on the “bay 2” disk.

(★ This step is hypothetical. I am not sure this is how Apple's EFI works, but I have seen something similar to this on my OpenFirmware machine.)

If the “bay 1” disk is only sporadically slow to finish “getting ready”, that might explain the ‘random’ starts from the second disk.

Interesting setup. I'm curious, which type of system is it?

Hello Chris!


Thank you for your detailed answer!
I suspected that one HD was little faster and therefore booting ready faster, no wonder it took few sec longer to boot with 2 bootable hd in the system.

I set booting drive in pref panel!

It is an iBook G4 with an apparently broken/flakey ATA controller (if any HD is attached, the system eventually stops working). Maybe it is a bad solder joint, maybe it is just another marginal iBook G4 logic board (they are notorious, the one in this machine is actually the third one it has seen).

The extra bootable partitions are remnants of the disk's previous life as one of my SuperDuper! backup disks (I have 5 volumes across two disks that I would rotate through). I intend to repartition this drive, but I do not yet have enough disk space to store the nice-to-have-but-not-critical-enough-to-backup data I have on the non-backup partition.

I would not really recommend this kind of setup, but it is working OK for me so far. Also, it feels like the system as a whole is a bit faster. The speed increase is probably just because the external disk operates at a higher RPM than did the internal disk (laptops use those slow 4200 RPM drives to save power).

The machine stopped working last December (would not boot from internal HD, CD (HW Test), DVD (Tiger install) or Firewire HD; Option-boot would freeze while scanning for volumes; Target Disk Mode would bounce the FW logo around only until another machine accessed the drive). I thought it was the logic board (again). A Mac Genius at one of the local Apple stores thought that it was probably the HD that was failing (and taking the rest of the system with it "by drawing too much power" (or something)). Replacing the HD was going to be cheaper than getting a new logic board, so I decided to try the HD first.

I replaced the HD (thanks, iFixIt!) and the system seemed to have recovered. The old HD seemed to work OK when I had it attached to a USB converter but I could not access the SMART attributes over USB. I even used SuperDuper! to copy from the "failed" HD to the new internal HD without a hitch (another hint that the HD was not having problems that were too serious—all the data was readable without error).

Six months later, the machine failed in much the same way. I removed the "new" HD and just started booting it from my Firewire drive (where it stands now).

A bit later the HD in a Mac mini failed (it had been showing a failing SMART status for a while—it really was failing) and I had a chance to test my "failed" HDs. They both worked fine in the mini, including a Verified SMART status in Disk Utility. I left the newer HD in the mini where it has been working for several weeks now.

Something else that might support this hypothesis is if the “bay 2” boots only happen when it is a “cold” boot from a completely powered-off state. Normal reboots ( > Restart…, or restart from the login menu) would probably leave the drives in a “ready” state, so the firmware should not have any problems finding both drives at boot time.

Also, you could just reconfigure the startup drive to be the “bay 2” drive (System Preferences). If the “bay 2” drive is always faster to “get ready”, then the problem should disappear. If the problem persists then either the time-to-get-ready for each drive and the time-to-start-booting for the firmware are all very close (with the drive times being variable), or something else is causing the problem.

Thanks alot for the reply! you answers helped me to resolve the problem!

One more question- in order for the scheduler to run on selected dates, Is it necessary to add superduper to login items or it runs a daemon in the background mode?

Alex

It runs automatically through the user crontab (see the Scheduling section of the User's Guide).

Thank you for reply! Very cool!