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CJRhoades

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 4, 2007
548
210
Lafayette, IN
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.

tempImageMGHzMe.jpg


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.

tempImagex0OuTD.jpg


tempImageKzxqTI.jpg


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:

tempImageQVTioD.jpg


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?
 
As an experiment to see if the tiger.dmg file I was using is somehow the problem, I tried the same with a leopard ISO file. Predictably, the same thing happened. The verification failed and then the disk was inaccessible. Strangely, after ejecting and plugging it back in, the Leopard installer window popped up and disk utility recognized that partition on the drive.

tempImageNuGJHv.jpg


As you can see however, the other partitions are damaged like before. I tried verifying the installer partition that appeared to have been made successfully and got this:

tempImage9Gb3jx.jpg


I'm even more confused now than I was. I really don't get what it is about Leopard's version of disk utility that causes everything to break. All of this stuff works just fine on Tiger.
 
I have a FW drive that I created for the same purposes. An installer for Tiger, Leopard, and full “live” installs of both. Plus a partition for files.

Give up on using the restore function for this. Make the partitions again, then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the OS X installation discs to the partitions. This can be done on modern OS X, with whatever version of CCC is out but you have to make sure to partition the drive with APM. Also the modern version of CCC will complain it isn’t bootable, but it will be bootable on a PPC mac so just ignore it. Or just download CCC 4 and use Tiger or Leopard to do it.

Also as a side note, I have never been able to get OS 9 to work as an external installer or even just as a live OS. I’m not sure why, but it just doesn’t work. It might depend on the enclosure being used. I’ve even installed directly from an OS 9 installer CD to the FW disk and it is still unbootable. It does work for classic though. The nice thing is that if you want to install OS 9 you can just restore it’s system image from OS X to whatever computer you need it on and it’ll work.
 
I have a FW drive that I created for the same purposes. An installer for Tiger, Leopard, and full “live” installs of both. Plus a partition for files.

Give up on using the restore function for this. Make the partitions again, then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the OS X installation discs to the partitions. This can be done on modern OS X, with whatever version of CCC is out but you have to make sure to partition the drive with APM. Also the modern version of CCC will complain it isn’t bootable, but it will be bootable on a PPC mac so just ignore it. Or just download CCC 4 and use Tiger or Leopard to do it.

Also as a side note, I have never been able to get OS 9 to work as an external installer or even just as a live OS. I’m not sure why, but it just doesn’t work. It might depend on the enclosure being used. I’ve even installed directly from an OS 9 installer CD to the FW disk and it is still unbootable. It does work for classic though. The nice thing is that if you want to install OS 9 you can just restore it’s system image from OS X to whatever computer you need it on and it’ll work.
I probably should have checked for an update on this thread earlier. It would have kept me from pulling my hair out for the last 3 hours.

In an effort to see if the drive really was the issue, I ripped apart the enclosure and replaced the original 250GB Samsung Spinpoint drive with a 500GB Hitachi I had laying around from when I upgraded my sisters 2011 MBP to an SSD a few years ago.

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Predictably, it didn't change anything. Just a slightly different error when verifying the volume.


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On the upside, now I've got a (probably faster) 500GB external with slightly lower power draw.

Guess I'll give CCC a shot. I never even gave other software a thought because disk utility on Tiger has always worked and done everything I've needed. Thanks for the info on OS 9. I never actually bothered to try that installer, just made it because I had an OS 9 CD laying around and figured it wouldn't hurt to have it on an external drive.
 
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I probably should have checked for an update on this thread earlier. It would have kept me from pulling my hair out for the last 3 hours.

In an effort to see if the drive really was the issue, I ripped apart the enclosure and replaced the original 250GB Samsung Spinpoint drive with a 500GB Hitachi I had laying around from when I upgraded my sisters 2011 MBP to an SSD a few years ago.

View attachment 1705742


Predictably, it didn't change anything. Just a slightly different error when verifying the volume.


View attachment 1705743


Guess I'll give CCC a shot. I never even gave other software a thought because disk utility on Tiger has always worked and done everything I've needed. Thanks for the info on OS 9. I never actually bothered to try that installer, just made it because I had an OS 9 CD laying around and figured it wouldn't hurt to have it on an external drive.
I’ve always had problems with the restore function of disk utility. It will work if you’re restoring to a disk or image the exact same size as the target disk I think.

It still works better than modern macOS disk utility though. I use Leopards disk utility for everything normally. In Mojave I have problems just formatting a USB flash drive sometimes.
 
I’ve always had problems with the restore function of disk utility. It will work if you’re restoring to a disk or image the exact same size as the target disk I think.

It still works better than modern macOS disk utility though. I use Leopards disk utility for everything normally. In Mojave I have problems just formatting a USB flash drive sometimes.

Yes! Disk Utility of late is horribly (and it appears, deliberately) crippled by Apple. I tried to use the restore function on El Capitan's Disk Utility to set up Snow Leopard via FireWire on a couple of MacBooks and it failed with an error message but when I switched to Snow Leopard on my 2006 MBP, that very same task went ahead just fine.
 
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