Initio Miles boot to OS X |
October, 29, 2003 7:11 AM |
kirkfuller |
With the release of the latest firmware update from Initio it is now possible to boot from drives on a Miles (9100UW) SCSI card. Nice, but it also makes the drives attached to the card unusable in OS 9. What I would like to do is install OS X on a RAID 0 configuration of 2 drives attached to the Miles card which is in my 8600 (G3@500). Hopes would be that the faster disk access would speed up OS X for me while at the same time not requiring me to purchase a new IDE RAID card and drives (trying to keep spending $$ at a minimum) I have tried the following to no avail. -Clean Install OS 9 on the built in Fast SCSI 4GB drive -Update Initio Miles Firmware to support OS X -Install OS X (XPostFacto of course!!) onto the built in drive (4GB) -Format the 2 9GB UW SCSI drives on the Miles card from within OS X (Software RAID within OS X) -Used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the internal boot drive to the RAID setup -Select RAID as startup disk and restart Essentially what happens is that the machine attempts to find and start from the RAID but cannot, thus it falls back onto the built in 4GB SCSI. I would like to keep the 4GB in there for my OS 9 boot drive, but if it must be removed for this setup to work, then out it goes. I'm going to try this tonight just to see if it has any affect. Ok, so, has anyone heard of or tried this before? I tried running the alpha XPostFacto to install onto the RAID within OS X but it would not let me select it (said this is not an installation disk when shown in the list of drives). Thanks for any info you can provide! -Kirk |
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RE: Initio Miles boot to OS X |
October, 29, 2003 2:24 PM |
gregoryy |
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I find the easy way is to use NetInfo Manager (/Application/Utilities) and change the home location to "/Volumes/MyHome" instead of "/Users/MyHome" and that will put your ~/ with the main folders for ~/Library and others (Documents, MOvies, etc). Anything you want. That way the system stays around 3.5GB and disk I/O is separate too. Works very well. The next step is three drives, RAID two for your home directory, put the system on its own drive. SCSI is nice because you don't have to worry about the system volume being first, or being smaller than 8GB. And with SCSI I have one drive with 3 or 4 different copies of OS X (backup, working, test, emergency, "clean" Apple 10.2.6 etc.). I understand someone else is using the ACard LVD Ultra160 which is 1/2 price of 29160, and less than even Miles2. ~$149 I think? |
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RE: Initio Miles boot to OS X |
October, 29, 2003 1:24 PM |
kirkfuller |
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That's what I was afraid of, but was figuring would happen. I had been using SoftRaid on the drives under OS 9. When I first tried out OS X on my 8600 (10.0) I think, I was very happy to find that Apple had included their own version of software raid. Back then I could setup the drives in RAID 0 and use them for data access, etc. Which is what I can do now if I choose to leave the boot drive on the built in fast SCSI. You mentioned moving users directory to another drive. I have not picked up on a lot of OS X yet so I would like to know how do you move system directories like that? With that, does anyone know the minimum that must remain on the boot drive? Perhaps I can still work this out without buying new hardware. I'm thinking, bare minimum on the built in fast scsi bus for the boot drive and then shove everything else to the RAID 0 stripe. I could only assume if this is possible that I would see slow startup times, but system access to programs, etc would be increased? Thanks! |
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RE: Initio Miles boot to OS X |
October, 29, 2003 7:59 AM |
gregoryy |
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A dead horse, and a losing battle. Booting from RAID requires G4-MDD era, maybe a QS2002. Today's 10k Atlas and Cheetahs deliver in the 65MB/sec under 65% load. So you need Ultra2 (ATTO UL2D, Miles2 maybe, Adaptec 29160 should work, works in Beige up thru G5-DP). Even ATA drives are now capable of 45-60MB/sec (Hitachi 7K250 SATA but SATA stinks on OldWorld, so use PATA like Sonnet Tempo or Trio). My Beige benefits from faster drives, putting the system on one drive, and ~/ (Users) on another drive reduces head contention and results in fewer 'beachballs.' SoftRAID 3 doesn't even support booting, let alone from RAID. The RAID support in the MDD is there in ROM code (along with ATA6 for 'large' drives). I even installed Jag, then cloned it to RAID, changed startup disk, pulled the original, "no-go." In the past I was able to boot from RAID-0 once in OS 9 even though the B&W doesn't support stripe booting, only from mirror, because it was the only system folder. You can get decent performance and 'feel' out of a new 36GB 10K Atlas ($148 at www.zipzoomfly.com ) even if you can't get the drive's full potential of 68-70MB/sec. I put a couple on 10MB/sec FastSCSI buses and they are a real boost, better on UltraSCSI 20MB/sec would help and be easier to do, just realize some of these drives do not format/initialize with Drive Setup 2.07 even (find a copy of DS 2.1) or use Disk Utility or maybe 3rd party. Even when a Cheetah 10K.6 did initialize, it had problems almost from the beginning. A good active terminator is probably essential, but at $150 for 36GB SCSI, not bad. Of course, for that amount, you can buy ATA/100 card and drive most likely even FirmTek SeriTek/1S2 SATA card and 36GB 10K Raptor (but only get 22MB/sec maybe?) but fully bootable and... tada! hassel free, too! |
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