Bootable OSX86 Raid Walkthrough

OK Guys time for another walkthrough! OSX86 RAID!

This time it is to create a bootable Striped Raid Array to give your Hard Disks some welly.

You will need a MINIMUM of 2 identical Hard Disks.

This will be for 2 disks, but it can be for more.

Step 1.
I am assuming that you have installed OSX86 on a single HD already and that you have it running just the way you want it.

You will need 2 further disks!

Step 2.
Open up Disk Utility and click on one of your newly installed Hard Drives in the LH pane. Then Select Raid from the top tab.
Drag your 2 new disks into the raid window as you would if you were using a real mac.

Name your array, I called mine "Macintosh Raid" then select Stripe from the dropdown box below.

Then click the "Create" button. A new disk called "Macintosh Raid" will pop up on your desktop.

OK, nothing too exiting so far.

Step 3.
Clone your existing working OSX86 drive with CCC or Superduper. Make sure you select not to reformat though, otherwise you will wipe the raid array you just made. You just want to copy the files.

You will now have a Raid drive that is a copy of your existing HD but it will not boot.


Step 4.
Open up Disk Utility and from the LH pane, right click "Macintosh Raid" Then select "Information".

Where you see Raid identifier which will look something like this:

RAID Identifier : 948357DD-2F47-4EE6-8F22-294C275C8A90.

Copy this by right clicking.

Drag your com.apple.boot.plist to your desktop and open it in text edit.

Copy the identifier you found in Disk Utility to the plist as below:

<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>boot-uuid=948357DD-2F47-4EE6-8F22-294C275C8A90</string>
<key>device-properties</key>

and replace the existing one. It must say: "boot-uuid="

(without quotation marks) in front of the identifier. You must replace your existing one at this stage or the whole project will be a waste of time.

Step 5.
Download Chameleon boot-loader from here and copy all the files to your desktop.

rapidshare.com/files/134271456/Chameleon_Files_.zip.html

Step 6.
Now, open the Terminal program from your utilities folder and type:

cd ~/desktop (hit return)

Then type:

sudo su (hit return and enter password)

Then type:

diskutil list (hit return)

which should show your disk partitions like this :



The first 2 disks shown each have an installation of OSX86 but the 2 disks we are interested in are /dev/disk2 & /dev/disk3. These are the 2 Raided disks. Depending on how your disks show up, change the /dev/rdisk2 information below to whatever information you need.

Step 7.
Into the terminal type:

fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdisk2 (then hit return)
then type:
fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdisk3 (then hit return)
then type:
dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdisk2s3 (then hit return)
then type:
dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdisk3s3 (then hit return)

OK so far..good, well carry on...

then type:

diskutil mount disk2s3 (then hit return)
then type:
cp boot /Volumes/Boot\ OSX (then hit return)
then type:
diskutil unmount disk2s3 (then hit return)
then type:
diskutil mount disk3s3 (then hit return)
then type:
cp boot /Volumes/Boot\ OSX (then hit return)
then type:
diskutil unmount disk3s3 (then hit return)

You are now finished and should have a bootable Raid drive. All you need to do now is reboot and select the first of the 2 raid drives that shows up in your bios and select that drive to boot from.

Thanks go to all the devs that worked this one out!



Scores for Hard Disks improve somewhat with Raid-see below: