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  #1  
Old 02-03-2008, 04:07 PM
Noren Noren is offline
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Disk Utility: Grayed out partition

Edit: I actually had to type this entire post twice. You may want to consider making the auto-logout time more generous.

In preparation for the Leopard-compatible version of SD!, I spent some time this weekend upgrading from Tiger to Leopard. Things did not go as smoothly as I had hoped...

Background:
My Mac is a 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4 with 2 GB of RAM. It had been running a fully-patched Tiger 10.4.11. I had been using SD! for quite some time to backup to an external hard drive.

Leopard prep:
Since my external backup drive was considerably larger than my internal hard drive, I decided to partition it into two equal partitions -- one for the final Tiger SD! backup and one for the nightly Leopard SD! backup. I spent some time going through this forum and decided to partition my 200 GB drive into two 100 GB partitions. They are formated Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and have the partition scheme Apple Partition Map.

In Tiger, I made a final SD! Smart Update to the Tiger partition on the external drive. It completed successfully. I then proceeded to boot my computer from it to double-check things. It was also successful. Finally, I booted back into Tiger, disconnected all of my peripherals and proceeded to install Leopard.

Leopard install:
The install of Leopard went smoothly. As soon as the install of the OS was finished, I installed the Leopard Development Tools. Finally, I ran Software Update until it didn't have anything left for me to install. By this time Spotlight had indexed my internal hard drive.

Leopard config:
I attached my powered USB hub to the notebook. The hub attaches my iPod, iPhone, 2 USB external hard drives, and my USB/FW external hard drive. Spotlight immediately saw the two USB drives and began indexing them, however my backup drive was nowhere to be found. The next morning, I opened the Finder to see literally 20 partitions from my backup drive. There were 10 each of "SD Tiger" and "SD Leopard", but the sizes were way off base. Some of the partitions were a few KB, some MBs, and one even 1.9 TB. I tried ejecting one and Leopard warned me of improper device removal. I opened Disk Utility thinking it might just be a Finder bug, but they showed there as well -- wrong sizes and all.

I decided I should shutdown and restart. The two USB drives unmounted fine and all of the programs quit, but the system would not restart. I left it for 4 hours before coming back and holding in the power button to force it.

The system restarted fine. The two USB drives immediately back being indexed by Spotlight. After approximately 30 minutes, my backup drive finally showed up in Disk Utility as the correct size and with the correct two partitions. However, only the empty SD Leopard partition mounted -- the SD Tiger partition is grayed out. I tried to mount it manually, but Disk Utility wanted me to run First Aid and I wasn't sure exactly what that would do.

Any thoughts?

PS: I apologize for the wall-of-text, but as a software developer myself I know it can be frustrating when dealing with support issues if the customer does not provide enough information. I always try to provide too much rather than too little.
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  #2  
Old 02-03-2008, 06:00 PM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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We don't actually create partitions, Noren -- we only copy from volume (partition) to volume. We wouldn't -- nay, couldn't -- have done this. Very weird... I have no idea what happened.
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Old 02-03-2008, 09:57 PM
Noren Noren is offline
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I wasn't blaming you or your software; I was just trying to make sure I didn't miss something obvious in my troubleshooting.

I was just posting to see if:

1) You had encountered this before [Obviously not ]

2) How I could proceed to get my unmountable SD Tiger partition mountable
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Old 02-03-2008, 10:04 PM
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I'd suggest booting from your Tiger DVD and repairing it with Tiger's Disk Utility... (in the Utilities menu).
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Old 02-04-2008, 08:43 AM
Noren Noren is offline
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No luck using Disk Utility in Leopard or on the install DVD. It looks like the partition is a loss.

I decided to do a "dumb copy" of my home directory to one of my other externals that I share with a Windows computer only to run into rdar://problem/5608271. I anxiously await the Leopard compatible release of SuperDuper so I can sleep soundly once again.

To anyone reading this thread, the moral of the story is: multiple backups = multiple drives. My desire to save a few coins left me without a safety net. Don't make my mistake.
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Old 02-04-2008, 08:51 AM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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Ugh. I wonder what happened to the partition? Perhaps try Disk Warrior?
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Old 02-04-2008, 08:30 PM
Noren Noren is offline
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Disk Warrior worked!

It took one pass over each of the partitions on the drive, but it was able to reconstruct the drive directory and recover all the data. I'm not sure the partition is still bootable, but at least I have all my data.

Thanks for your help with this Dave!
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Old 02-04-2008, 08:51 PM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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Hey, that's great news -- congrats!
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