Reinstalling with SuperDuper! backup on external eSATA setup
 

Greetings.. been using SuperDuper! on a lot of different systems for quite a while and have had great luck, but recently ran into an "issue" of sorts with a box and could use some advice.

I have a G5 PowerMac with two internal 300GB harddrives. I always intended to stripe these into one 600GB harddrive but never got around to it.. while in the meantime I installed a Sonnet eSATA 4+4 PCI Card + Sonnet eSATA enclosure that does not support booting. The enclosure contains two of the exact same 300GB drives the G5 contains, BUT I striped them together into one 600GB drive before using it as a backup.

The problem I have is two-fold. One, I hate having clutter on my desktop and I'd feel a lot better if the two internal harddrives were viewed as one (drive failure / data loss be damned). Second, I hate having to use two separate harddrives to store my data and as a result I've only ever used one of the internal 300GBs and now I'm running out of space. So, I either need to finally bite the bullet and start using the second drive as well, or...

I need to figure out how to wipe and stripe the two internal harddrives using my 10.4 Install DVD and then have a bootable system copied onto these fresh new drives (er, single striped drive) from the external eSATA enclosure that has a Smart Update backup from SuperDuper!

As I can't boot from the external I thought I was screwed, but someone recommend using Terminal to access SuperDuper! on the external.. does any of this make sense? Does anyone have better advice? Am I dumb?

Thanks for any and all help...

Well, as always, it makes me nervous to voluntarily clobber a drive when you can't actually start up from your backup.

But, if you start up from your Tiger DVD, can you access both the eSata and the internal drive? If so, you can partition and restore.

Be careful. I'd really rather have you do a full backup to an external FireWire drive of the internal, then start up from it, then stripe and restore, because that'll ensure that you have a verifiable source.

Dave.. after posting my rambling question I thought long and hard about what it was I was thinking of attempting. Reality struck and I figured it'd be best to borrow or purchase an external FW drive that I could also backup to AND boot from. Thanks for the help.

Absolutely. :)