Last night I did something seemingly stupid and dangerous with my Mac but it ended up working flawlessly. I recently added two new 750GB Seagate Barracuda drives to my PowerMac G4 (these drives are quiet!) and mirrored them. These were used for a gigantic video editing project which consumes the gigabytes like a fish drinks water. These giant drives replaced a pair of smaller drives which I had striped in a RAID pair using Apple's Disk Utility. I had copied over the files from the striped set onto other single drives, however I realized I missed something along the way. One folder was short about a dozen files. And not junk, but stuff I wanted to keep! Doh! I had not done anything to the old RAID set however I had no idea if it was possible to remove the drives from the computer, reinstall them at a later time and have the OS still recognize them as a RAID array in days of yore.
Then I did something really really dumb, I shut down my machine and removed the mirrored 750GB drives (a total lie actually, the capacity is 698GB...bastards) without backing them up! Well, I had no place to back them up. Not enough free space on the other two single hard disks! So here I was potentially sacrificing the entire video project if this didn't work. Fucking moronic, I thought.
I then reinstalled the small striped RAID (I was at least smart enough to mark the position of the drives before removing them the first time) and to my surprise they mounted once again upon reboot, just like before! Sweet! I copied off the missing files to one of the single disks. Then I removed the striped RAID disks, reinstalled the 698GB mirrored pair and that too reappeared without a hitch upon reboot! Fucking amazing! The only price paid was judicious amounts of lost sleep, but we can blame some part of that on stupid ass Daylight Saving Time. Maybe the government should pass a law saying there's now 48 hours in a day instead of 24. Heck, that way we'd all have more time after work to do stuff. It's Magic™!
So the moral of the story is yes, you can remove software RAID'ed disks from a Mac, stick them back in and have them act as they did before. Perhaps I truly believed this was entirely possible in the back of my mind, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. But it did feel like an incredibly risky and foolish thing to do when I was contemplating it. I figured the relationship these two disks had to one another was forgotten once they were extracted from their host machine. Ahh, but it was not so, thankfully!
Clearly the world is now a better place having those dozen or so drum solo AIFF files restored. Ahhh...This is something humans will have to deal with more and more as time goes on. This bizarre attachment we have to something as abstract as magnetic blurbs on platters. How sad to have one's personal sense of well-being hinged upon the integrity of computer data. What can I say, that's the world we live in. *sigh*
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment