Setting up a RAID on a Powermac G4

[John Archer]

Hello
I wonder if anyone can give me the basic steps to setting up a RAID array on a Powermac G4 (I think I mean a Raid 0 ie one extra hard drive).
I have looked up a couple of articles but they advise to use the original install disc during the set up process. Unfortunately I don't have the original install disc. I have available one extra internal hard drive and one external hard drive.
I would like to set it up so that there are two internal hard drives with one replicating to the other one.
Thanks a lot for reading

 

[Semiopaque]

Hello
I wonder if anyone can give me the basic steps to setting up a RAID array on a Powermac G4 (I think I mean a Raid 0 ie one extra hard drive).
I have looked up a couple of articles but they advise to use the original install disc during the set up process. Unfortunately I don't have the original install disc. I have available one extra internal hard drive and one external hard drive.
I would like to set it up so that there are two internal hard drives with one replicating to the other one.
Thanks a lot for reading

Does this mean you have two total internal drives and one external? Is the external a Firewire drive or USB? Did you want to put your original OS inside the raid?

 

[John Archer]

Yes on both counts two internal. and one external. The situation I would like to end up with is to have two internal drives with one replicating to the other one. Basically it is for fault tolerance ie if one fails the other could continue running the machine. I guess that means that the original OS is in the RAID.
The external would not be in the RAID but can be used for any temporary copying etc.

 

[Semiopaque]

If your external drive is Firewire(USB will NOT work on the G4s), you can clone your exisiting OS over to it using SuperDuper. The free version will work for the clone procedure, just make sure you follow the instructions. This will erase anything on that external drive, though unless you have an open partition on it. If the external is currently blank, I would format and partition it using Disk Utility into two partitions, one around the same size as what you will be cloning over the other to put any data you have on your internal so you do not lost it. Clone all your internal stuff over to the firewire drive. Then make sure you can boot to the external by switching to a new start boot target in preferences.

Once you've checked that all your data and stuff is on the external and the cloned OS on the external can be booted, you can then use Disk Utility (from your booted external OS clone) to put your two internal drives into a Mirrored RAID. Again, this will erase EVERYTHING on the internal drives. It is recommended that the two internal drives be exactly the same size/speed/etc. however, you can get around this and not lost drive space if you partition a larger drive to have one partition the exact same size as the smaller drive.

Sorry , I'm throwing alot of stuff out there just don't have time to do a big ol' tutorial at the moment, but let me know if you have questions.

Be careful doing all this as you could end up losing all your data if you make a mistake. The first key would be to get your OS cloned so that you at least have a backup of it since you no longer have the original install disks .

If your external drive is USB only, you will additional issues since the G4s cannot boot from USB. Hoping you have FW drive.

I can go into more detail later if you need addt'l info.

 

[John Archer]

Hi
That seems to be within my technical ability - so will give it a go
Thanks very much for taking the time to reply.