I wrote earlier about a week or two ago asking whether or not my Hard Disk was dying. It was an external disk with media on it, so I wasn’t totally in a hurry. So last friday, I went out and bought a 500 GB hard disk to replace it with.
Then I got to thinking… Why don’t I just put it inside my computer? I have an iMac, so it was a bit tricky (had to go out and buy special torx tools). I really wish that I had zeroed out the disk before using it (supposed to check for bad sectors), but oh well, maybe I’ll do a surface scan some day soon. So I cloned it with Carbon Copy Cloner, and booted off of it externally to check to see if it’d work before I put it in.
So I turn it on and see a black screen telling me that I don’t have a disk! So I then reboot and hold down the alt key to see if it recognized it. Thankfully it did. So then I boot up, and open disk utility to run some checks on it, and it totally froze up while verifying the disk.
So I reboot again, again having to hold alt. This time the disk verification worked fine, and then I started to do a permissions repair. This was weird, because it found TONS of them, far more than normal. I’m running Leopard, btw, which treats permissions far differently as far as I know.
So my question is, should I be worried? And if so, what can I do? Everything seems fine now, but what steps can I take to make sure that things are going well. I tried the surface scan, but couldn’t do that because I guess it’s not possible if you booted from that disk.
You can boot off your Leopard (or Tiger, or whatever) installation DVD. When the installer comes up, check the menu bar; you’ll be able to run Disk Utilities from there. This is useful when you want to check the boot disk for something.
The oddness on booting was probably because you were unable to designate the drive as your startup disk before booting from it. OS X was looking for the original drive at that bus address, didn’t find it, and said in effect, “I’m lost, dude.” It’ll look for inserted DVD/CDs and external drives for a startup disk, but it’s kind of anomalous to find an internal drive not designated as the boot disk. Your manual intervention forced it to look in all possible locations for any bootable system folder.
The permissions problems were probably related to the copy process. Possibilities are: file or metadata corruption from a bad original disk that were faithfully copied over to the new disk. CCC failings in copying all permissions properly (certainly possible since SuperDuper has a better track record with permissions and metadata than CCC, not that CCC is bad at all). Or not setting your clone to be a bootable disk in CCC when you cloned it. Probably other things than I’ve pointed out could have gone wrong too, as I’m not a pro.
If you’re not afraid of the command line, you can also run fsck before booting the system, without having to boot from the install disk. Disk Utility is actually just a GUI for running fsck and other disk tools. There’s a support page at Apple on disk maintenance that tells you in detail how to do this. The short version is: 1) Boot into Single User mode. Hold down the command key + S at boot. You’ll see the UNIX underpinnings of OS X as the screen shows lots of white on black text. 2) When you get a prompt, type “sudo fsck -fy”, without the quotes. The sudo command is to provide authentication. It will ask you for your password, and if it’s your first time running sudo will give you the Spiderman warning, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The -fy options are to force the check, even if the system thinks it’s unnecessary, and to say yes to any and all queries about running any necessary repairs, are you sure you want to do that?, etc.
When it has done its thing, just type “reboot” and it will restart the system and boot normally.
Oh, I would boot into single-user mode, but I think it’s impossible for me to do that.
See I have one of the new Apple Aluminum keyboards. And guess what? They don’t work until you are in OSX. So the way I actually chose the boot disk the first time was by holding down the menu button on the apple remote. That actually gets you the boot menu, believe it or not, but as for other boot-time options I think I’m SOL.
But I guess I can do the surface scan from Disk Utility. Or wait, does the Leopard boot disk allow you to use the terminal? I think that’d be the best and use fsck the way you mentioned…
Oh, a bluetooth keyboard? Yeah, I guess that wouldn’t work unless you have the network protocols loaded. If you have a USB keyboard lying around, any old keyboard will work.
But yeah, if you’re stuck with no alternate keyboard, then booting from your install disk is the best idea. Once you’ve done that, there’s no advantage that I know of in running fsck in preference to Disk Utility if you’re already booted into the system with all the GUI up and running. All DU does is run fsck anyway.
You know what Sleel, it actually isn’t bluetooth, yet it doesn’t effing work anyway!
These keyboards are pretty awesome, but I have no idea how Apple managed to screw this up. The USB keyboard isn’t standards compliant, I guess, so it won’t work before bootup. I am pretty sure it won’t work on PCs either, at least without some hacking. Apple doesn’t seem to be in a big hurry to fix it either.
As far as I know, it is standards compliant, USB is universal. People have used those keyboards on Windows PCs with no problems, though some of the key mappings are different; for example, the command key and dedicated keys for Expose.
I think the reason it’s not working for you is probably due to the OS problems you had due to cloning the drive, or (less likely) a specific problem with either the keyboard or your computer. If you have a different keyboard, you should try using it. If that one doesn’t work either, then you’ve narrowed down the problem a bit. If it does work, you can run your disk check, run any updates to make sure you’ve got the latest revisions, and maybe get the problem fixed.