Until recently, my experience with PPC Macs have been limited to Tiger as I didn't have a machine capable of running Leopard. I recently acquired a 1.5GHz 15" PB G4 however and have been playing with it over the last week. I've been working on creating a do-all firewire external drive for old Macs with file repositories and installer partitions for various operating systems as it's much faster than installing off optical media. The drive had 5 partitions on it, one for various files, 3 installer partitions (OS 9, 10.2, 10.5), and 1 partition with a live install of Tiger.
Up to this point, all of the work on the drive had been done by my 667MHz TiBook running Tiger. I've been meaning to put a new installer partition on that drive with a 10.4 installer and decided to do it with my new AlBook running Leopard. Creating the new partition went fine, and I used the restore function with a Tiger dmg file as the source and the newly created partition as the destination with the setting to erase the destination turned on so it did a block by block copy. Note: the following photos are from a later recreation of the problem so the names/number of partitions is not accurate.
The copying blocks part went along like usual, but at the end of the verification part, it seemed to hang and then I got an Restore Failure error saying the operation had timed out.
At this point, none of the drive was accessible, so I ejected it and plugged it back in. I got an error on screen saying the drive was not readable by MacOS and it prompted me to open disk utility to repair it. All of my partition names were gone in disk utility, replaced by generic "disk1s2, disk1s3, etc". I tried mounting the disk and got an error saying they needed to be repaired, so I tried that and got the following error:
Plugging the drive into my TiBook produced the same errors, with all partitions being unrepairable. Luckily, all the files that had been on it were backed up online, the various OS disk images could be redownloaded, and it would only take me a few hours to get it all set back up again, so I figured I'd just erase the entire drive and try again. First thing I did was try to create a 10.4 install partition again on the AlBook to see if it would happen again, and sure enough it failed in the same fashion. I was pretty convinced the drive was dying as it was over 10 years old and I couldn't think of another reason this might be happening. Just for fun, I tried it on my TiBook with the exact same dmg and to my surprise it worked perfectly. I erased it and did it a 2nd time and it again worked just fine. So I went back to the AlBook and tried again (this is when I took the above photos) and it failed in the exact same way, again corrupting the entire drive. So now I'm stumped as the drive doesn't appear the be the issue.
Anyone have ideas about whats going on here? Why is disk utility on my Leopard machine destroying my entire drive every time I use the restore function?
Up to this point, all of the work on the drive had been done by my 667MHz TiBook running Tiger. I've been meaning to put a new installer partition on that drive with a 10.4 installer and decided to do it with my new AlBook running Leopard. Creating the new partition went fine, and I used the restore function with a Tiger dmg file as the source and the newly created partition as the destination with the setting to erase the destination turned on so it did a block by block copy. Note: the following photos are from a later recreation of the problem so the names/number of partitions is not accurate.
The copying blocks part went along like usual, but at the end of the verification part, it seemed to hang and then I got an Restore Failure error saying the operation had timed out.
At this point, none of the drive was accessible, so I ejected it and plugged it back in. I got an error on screen saying the drive was not readable by MacOS and it prompted me to open disk utility to repair it. All of my partition names were gone in disk utility, replaced by generic "disk1s2, disk1s3, etc". I tried mounting the disk and got an error saying they needed to be repaired, so I tried that and got the following error:
Plugging the drive into my TiBook produced the same errors, with all partitions being unrepairable. Luckily, all the files that had been on it were backed up online, the various OS disk images could be redownloaded, and it would only take me a few hours to get it all set back up again, so I figured I'd just erase the entire drive and try again. First thing I did was try to create a 10.4 install partition again on the AlBook to see if it would happen again, and sure enough it failed in the same fashion. I was pretty convinced the drive was dying as it was over 10 years old and I couldn't think of another reason this might be happening. Just for fun, I tried it on my TiBook with the exact same dmg and to my surprise it worked perfectly. I erased it and did it a 2nd time and it again worked just fine. So I went back to the AlBook and tried again (this is when I took the above photos) and it failed in the exact same way, again corrupting the entire drive. So now I'm stumped as the drive doesn't appear the be the issue.
Anyone have ideas about whats going on here? Why is disk utility on my Leopard machine destroying my entire drive every time I use the restore function?
