New User Strategy

[sjk]

Originally Posted by bill s

Apple is replacing my 250GB drive.

Sorry to hear about your trouble. Which drive do you have? Yesterday I replaced the ailing 250GB Maxtor 7Y250M0 in my iMac G5. Before removing it I ran SpeedTools Media Scanner (included with the 250GB OWC FW drive I just bought) which found many bad sectors (enough that I eventually lost interest in manually remapping them), then I let STMS run all night on the new drive and it came up clean.

Right now I'm considering some partition changes before restoring data to the new drive. Previously I had a ~35GB boot volume (including /Users) and the remainder was a non-journaled "media" volume primarily for audio/video files. Backups and other data are still on an older 120GB FW drive. I'm thinking of moving /Users to a separate volume since that'll make it and the boot volume smaller and easier to manage (e.g. backups), even though it means more combined "overhead" space for two volumes.

And thanks to Bill's fine Safety Clone summary I now see how to make effective use of that SD! feature and will repartition my FW drive(s) to accommodate it into the more robust backup strategy I'm working on. Even though it looks like only a bit of unimportant e-mail was lost it's made me particularly concerned about the integrity of the drive so I want to be better prepared optimal recovery if this one decides to fail. There was no S.M.A.R.T. error and Apple Hardware Test came up clean so I'd risked using the original drive after repartitioning while closely monitoring for any suspicious console errors (e.g. disk i/o errors).

Moving forward, I want to minimize the chance of overwriting a good SD! clone (for example) with bad data in an automated backup environment; about a week's worth of rollback possibility will be sufficient. And important data can be copied to another system for redundancy. Still working out details for using SD! along with some kind of "incremental" backups. Even with the new 250GB drive I'd rather not save more data (e.g. cloned images) than necessary.

[bill s]

My drive is/was the Maxtor 250GB 7Y250M0. Apple replaced it with an identical unit which tetsed perfectly, after I installed it, using the Apple Hardware Test Disk. I'm using an OWC 160 GB external FW drive for my SD backup/sandbox partitions. I follow Dave's instructions pretty explicitly for the day to day backup operations and booting from sandbox.
Hopefully the old HD was the source of my problems. I should know better if I don't run into problems again foe a couple of weeks or so.

[bill s]

Dave
Got a new drive and installed it 12 days ago. Everything seems 100% to date. Thanks.
I do have a dumb question now. I've been running OS 10.3.6 and am considering upgrading to 10.3.7. I want to do it as you've described, install it on "sandbox" until I'm sure it's not causing any problems. However, my backup & sandbox volumes are on an external FW drive. The instructions for installing 10.3.7 specifically state that external FW drives should be disconnected during installation. Some catch 22! What do you suggest?
Thanks for your help.

Bill

[dnanian]

A definitely dilemma. The only thing I can suggest is to use the procedure in the Appendix (or iPartition) to put the Safety Clone on the internal drive.

Of course: the potential failure here would, at worst, do something to the FireWire drive. As such, your internal drive would be OK, and you could boot right back to it in case of trouble... it might be worth a try to the FW drive.