errantember (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
errantember) wrote2009-08-18 12:29 am
errantember) wrote2009-08-18 12:29 am
Entry tags:
Beating an Unrecognizable, Horse-Like Mass
Since having it surrendered by my father after I helped get him a Powerbook laptop, my Dad's old G4 tower has been undergoing an overhaul that, rather than taking the hour it should have taken, has instead taken almost a week. The Simple Task at the root of this Massive Operation was copying the OS from it's older 10 gig drive to a new 80 gig drive. The following efforts to make this happen met with miserable failure...
1) Copy the old drive onto the new drive by attaching the new drive with Firewire: FAILED
REASON: Can't copy from the drive running the OS while it's running, and when I did, the copy continued until over three times the total amount of data on the original drive had been placed on the destination drive, with No End In Sight.
2) Boot from my 10.3 CD and use Disk Utility to backup the original drive and restore it to the new drive: FAILED
REASON: A) Can only find CD 2 (not 1, not 3) from the 10.3 disks. After the disc was finally retrieved, there was no 3rd place to store the image temporarily. Also, 10.3 does not have a Terminal feature like 10.4 and later releases do, so a manual copy is impossible. Also, even if it did work, using disk utility to do drive transfers is like using a spoon to move oil across the Atlantic.
3) Place new drive into system with old drive: FAILED for same reason as 1) above
4) Boot computer with 10.4 DVD to use Terminal to do copy using any one of three different, known-good DVD drives that each had to be manually installed one at a time: FAILED
REASON: The copy of 10.4 I have is *only* readable in my own Powerbook and not, evidently, by a single other fucking drive in the universe.
5) Boot Dad's computer into Target Disk Mode, which allows you to treat it like an external drive, then install 10.4 directly onto the new disk using my Powerbook: FAILED
REASON: Your mother is a whore, and the installer will not allow installation onto an external disk, claiming it can't boot to that disk, *even* when that disc is, in fact, the main bootable disk on another fucking machine.
At this point my two remaining choices were:
Download a new copy of 10.3 (which I know I already own, but can't find) or make another copy of 10.4 using the DVD burner which A) produced the original disk unreadable by other drives B) will use the same exact media the original copy is unreadable on.
Having played this game before, I realized that the only way to win was playing Murphy against himself, so I had *already* initiated the 10.3 download, not hours, but *days* before, with no end in sight. I had to place a deadline on it's terminally slow download, and the only way to pursue that was to find a second path that would work and blow as many resources and time as possible in the process. So I started the process of making an new, identical, useless copy of 10.4 using the same powerbook that make the original useless copy, a process which takes hours at it's only 2X write speed. Naturally, the download of 10.3 finished while this was still happening, putting me in the same position as originally, but in reverse. So I then committed another non-reuseable resource to oblivion by burning the copy of 10.3 onto a write-once CD, at which point Murphy finally appeared to give up in disgust and exhaustion, allowing me to boot the old computer into 10.3.
The following is the final sequence that lead to victory for the Forces of Dogged Persistence:
1) Boot my Powerbook with the 10.4 DVD in the drive in Target Disk Mode, turning the computer into a big external DVD-ROM for Dad's computer.
2) Boot Dad's computer with the 10.3 CD, the only thing besides the original drive it could boot from, just to get the system running on something other than the original drive.
3) Run the installer from 10.4 (via the Target Disk Mode firewire connection) to allow me to boot Dad's computer into 10.4, otherwise impossible due the drive incompatibility with the 10.4 DVD.
4) Booting my Dad's system into 10.4, I was *finally* able to copy the files from the old drive to the new drive. I knew better than to imagine it would work on the first try. I accidentally typed:
cp -Rp /Volumes/Dads /Volumes/NewDrive/
instead of
cp -Rp /Volumes/Dads /Volumes/NewDrive
...thereby copying the entire system in the Dad subdirectory of the new drive. Subsequent Superuser mv attempts to correct the problem lead to an unbootable disk, at which point I started over after erasing the target drive.
The second time, finally, it worked.
Of course, I left out a lot of boring details. :)
1) Copy the old drive onto the new drive by attaching the new drive with Firewire: FAILED
REASON: Can't copy from the drive running the OS while it's running, and when I did, the copy continued until over three times the total amount of data on the original drive had been placed on the destination drive, with No End In Sight.
2) Boot from my 10.3 CD and use Disk Utility to backup the original drive and restore it to the new drive: FAILED
REASON: A) Can only find CD 2 (not 1, not 3) from the 10.3 disks. After the disc was finally retrieved, there was no 3rd place to store the image temporarily. Also, 10.3 does not have a Terminal feature like 10.4 and later releases do, so a manual copy is impossible. Also, even if it did work, using disk utility to do drive transfers is like using a spoon to move oil across the Atlantic.
3) Place new drive into system with old drive: FAILED for same reason as 1) above
4) Boot computer with 10.4 DVD to use Terminal to do copy using any one of three different, known-good DVD drives that each had to be manually installed one at a time: FAILED
REASON: The copy of 10.4 I have is *only* readable in my own Powerbook and not, evidently, by a single other fucking drive in the universe.
5) Boot Dad's computer into Target Disk Mode, which allows you to treat it like an external drive, then install 10.4 directly onto the new disk using my Powerbook: FAILED
REASON: Your mother is a whore, and the installer will not allow installation onto an external disk, claiming it can't boot to that disk, *even* when that disc is, in fact, the main bootable disk on another fucking machine.
At this point my two remaining choices were:
Download a new copy of 10.3 (which I know I already own, but can't find) or make another copy of 10.4 using the DVD burner which A) produced the original disk unreadable by other drives B) will use the same exact media the original copy is unreadable on.
Having played this game before, I realized that the only way to win was playing Murphy against himself, so I had *already* initiated the 10.3 download, not hours, but *days* before, with no end in sight. I had to place a deadline on it's terminally slow download, and the only way to pursue that was to find a second path that would work and blow as many resources and time as possible in the process. So I started the process of making an new, identical, useless copy of 10.4 using the same powerbook that make the original useless copy, a process which takes hours at it's only 2X write speed. Naturally, the download of 10.3 finished while this was still happening, putting me in the same position as originally, but in reverse. So I then committed another non-reuseable resource to oblivion by burning the copy of 10.3 onto a write-once CD, at which point Murphy finally appeared to give up in disgust and exhaustion, allowing me to boot the old computer into 10.3.
The following is the final sequence that lead to victory for the Forces of Dogged Persistence:
1) Boot my Powerbook with the 10.4 DVD in the drive in Target Disk Mode, turning the computer into a big external DVD-ROM for Dad's computer.
2) Boot Dad's computer with the 10.3 CD, the only thing besides the original drive it could boot from, just to get the system running on something other than the original drive.
3) Run the installer from 10.4 (via the Target Disk Mode firewire connection) to allow me to boot Dad's computer into 10.4, otherwise impossible due the drive incompatibility with the 10.4 DVD.
4) Booting my Dad's system into 10.4, I was *finally* able to copy the files from the old drive to the new drive. I knew better than to imagine it would work on the first try. I accidentally typed:
cp -Rp /Volumes/Dads /Volumes/NewDrive/
instead of
cp -Rp /Volumes/Dads /Volumes/NewDrive
...thereby copying the entire system in the Dad subdirectory of the new drive. Subsequent Superuser mv attempts to correct the problem lead to an unbootable disk, at which point I started over after erasing the target drive.
The second time, finally, it worked.
Of course, I left out a lot of boring details. :)
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Thank God I had other things to do during the interminable waits.
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Hooray for dogged determination!