MacPro information

[Reiddm]

I need help with the MacPro again, I got up this AM and the gray screen greeted me telling me I need to restart, it would not, got the DVD install disk in the drive and booted from it, repaired the permissions and restart, all I get is the gray screen telling me to restart, repeated the samething with the install disk and still had the same results so I did a wipe and reload, now all my external and internal disks are locked??? How do I unlock them as one of them is my time machine disk? Thank you!!

[jchuzi]

I can't say anything about the locked disks but a good place to start is Resolving Kernel Panics because that's what you had when you got that message to restart.

[Paddy]

Kernel panics are often the result of hardware issues - and bad RAM is often the culprit. Have you installed any new RAM lately by any chance?

As for the now-locked drives, that's no picnic. Do you have a cloned backup drive by any chance? (ALWAYS, ALWAYS have a cloned backup before wiping and restoring a drive. ALWAYS. And make sure it works before you do any erasing of the primary drive!)

If you have a clone, just start up from that - it shouldn't give you any permissions problems if it's the startup drive. If it's working fine, then clone it to the clean drive.

If you have no clone, I think you need to start over and follow the procedure here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?pa...5/en/15638.html

You select restore from Time Machine in Utilities WITHOUT installing the OS first (I suspect that this is where you went wrong?).

[Reiddm]

QUOTE(Paddy @ Jun 11 2010, 10:21 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Kernel panics are often the result of hardware issues - and bad RAM is often the culprit. Have you installed any new RAM lately by any chance?

As for the now-locked drives, that's no picnic. Do you have a cloned backup drive by any chance? (ALWAYS, ALWAYS have a cloned backup before wiping and restoring a drive. ALWAYS. And make sure it works before you do any erasing of the primary drive!)

If you have a clone, just start up from that - it shouldn't give you any permissions problems if it's the startup drive. If it's working fine, then clone it to the clean drive.

If you have no clone, I think you need to start over and follow the procedure here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?pa...5/en/15638.html

You select restore from Time Machine in Utilities WITHOUT installing the OS first (I suspect that this is where you went wrong?).

Well that was an experience I could have done without! I finally called Apple, (i thank God I purchased the extended warranty) and it is now fixed, it took going into terminal to fix the problem, the Tech had to get the head tech to get me through this! It was real simple from that point on! Thank you for the advice, now I will keep a back-up on a group of DVD's. We both think something went wrong with the new Safari install!

[Paddy]

Um, you need bootable backup - on an external or internal drive. Adding another internal drive to your Mac Pro is ridiculously easy - and then you can just clone to that. This is in addition to your Time Machine backup. DVDs won't help you in situation like you just had - a clone would have, as you could have simply rebooted to it and carried on and/or done troubleshooting on the main drive from the clone.

Use SuperDuper, which can be set up to do an automatic backup nightly, or at whatever interval you choose, to clone to the new drive. Of course, if you prefer, you can put a backup drive in an external enclosure, but that just adds expense. (I have both internal and external drives...I have redundant backups as well; Time Machine, nightly clone and weekly clone)

Time Machine backups are great - but they're not bootable. If your main drive goes south, you're out of luck until you replace it and restore from TM. A clone can boot your Mac in the time it takes to reboot with the option key held down to select the clone instead of your normal startup drive. If you make daily backups, you'll not lose much in the even of total HD failure - and with TM as well, you'll be able to recover almost everything. Time Machine backs up everything that has changed every hour - and keeps the old files as well, so it has a valuable and different function than a clone, which is an exact copy of your hard drive at the time the clone was made.

BTW - did the Apple techs get you to do something like what is detailed in this thread?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=466696

I was going to suggest reading that thread, but decided that the wipe and restore from TM might be a safer place to start.

[Reiddm]

QUOTE(Paddy @ Jun 12 2010, 02:52 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Um, you need bootable backup - on an external or internal drive. Adding another internal drive to your Mac Pro is ridiculously easy - and then you can just clone to that. This is in addition to your Time Machine backup. DVDs won't help you in situation like you just had - a clone would have, as you could have simply rebooted to it and carried on and/or done troubleshooting on the main drive from the clone.

Use SuperDuper, which can be set up to do an automatic backup nightly, or at whatever interval you choose, to clone to the new drive. Of course, if you prefer, you can put a backup drive in an external enclosure, but that just adds expense. (I have both internal and external drives...I have redundant backups as well; Time Machine, nightly clone and weekly clone)

Time Machine backups are great - but they're not bootable. If your main drive goes south, you're out of luck until you replace it and restore from TM. A clone can boot your Mac in the time it takes to reboot with the option key held down to select the clone instead of your normal startup drive. If you make daily backups, you'll not lose much in the even of total HD failure - and with TM as well, you'll be able to recover almost everything. Time Machine backs up everything that has changed every hour - and keeps the old files as well, so it has a valuable and different function than a clone, which is an exact copy of your hard drive at the time the clone was made.

BTW - did the Apple techs get you to do something like what is detailed in this thread?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=466696

I was going to suggest reading that thread, but decided that the wipe and restore from TM might be a safer place to start.

No more room inside, I have 3-2 TB’s in there now + the 1 TB as my OS drive, I run two 1.5 TB’s as back-ups, but as I said, the only drive that I could access was the OS drive, the others were showing locked, when I would try to access them it told me I did not have permission to access, running repair permissions did not work even using the system disk that came with the computer, after restarting  when I tried get info it show all disks having “custom” access, when I would try to set them to read and write it would switch back to custom? I’ll be looking for RW Blu-ray DL soon, if they make them that way, if not just RW Blu-ray! I saved the terminal instructions as well, just in case! Now that the stress level is down time to take a shower and call it a night, see you tomorrow!