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I previously posted about a problem that occurred due to a series of momentary power outages, which resulted in one of my internal drives being knocked out. I thought it was a goner.
Well, a trip to my local Apple store yesterday got me a suggestion to run Restore from Disk Utility. That's something I've never done before, so it hadn't occurred to me that it would work. Sure enough, the drive seems okay now. Of course, I lost all the data on it, but that didn't matter to me, since I hadn't been actively using this drive for some time. Anyway, I now have a blank hard drive (not even an OS installed) and I'm wondering what to do with it?
This is a question that I've had for years. I never knew what to do with my unused internal drives whose function was taken over when I installed a larger drive.
In the past, I just kept them in place, figuring that the data on them might come in handy someday. In actuality, I never went back to the old drives, since the data worth keeping had been safely moved onto the larger replacement drives.
The recovered drive is 300gb and because it's a lot smaller than the 750gb drives that I'm currently using, I figured it isn't large enough to use for a clone of the main drive, which is how I backup. So what use would you suggest for this drive?
I would love to get some ideas about what others do with installed drives that they no longer boot to.
Thanks for your thoughts,
GeneL
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Sorry. If I knew that you didn't care about the data, I would have just told you to erase it.
I'd install an OS on that drive or clone my boot volume to it. I always keep at least one spare boot volume in my towers as a just-in-case.
My spare drives seldom remain spare for long unless they don't have sufficient capacity for today's demands.
For example, I have an old 300GB drive currently being used to store my old audio tapes as I rip them.
A 120GB was recently repurposed as an alternate boot volume when I wanted to play with Linux as a server-platform.
I just put an old 60Gb in a tower at my parents' house for automated backups of my mom's laptop.
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That's a record amount of overthinking for a spare backup drive.
Glad it's over . . .
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MacMagus wrote: I'd… clone my boot volume to it.
How do I clone the contents of a 750gb drive to a 300gb drive?
I guess I could just install an OS on it or partition it and install both Leopard and Tiger on it in order to use it to test for OS issues if I have a problem with an application. Does that make any sense? Anyway, thanks for all your suggestions, Mac.
B L, thanks for the thought, but I'm still wondering if there could have been any other damage to my computer, which might show up at some later date? I'm really puzzled about why only the one drive was affected, so far. My oldest drive, the one that came installed with the computer wasn't loused up, so what do you think happened?
Btw, I put off the operation by doing some specialized "decompression" therapy. This really helped for a while, but I recently took another fall and now my back and knees are involved. I'm falling apart and struggling with an extreme lack of sleep.
I took a dexedrine this morning and now I'm feeling horrible, On one side my exhaustion is almost unbearable, but I can't seem to just lie down and stay asleep. I've been on the edge of wanting to go to the hospital all day.
So, how are you doing? Are you still being held captive in the Northwest?
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I could use it . . . I have a 200 GB that croaked about a year ago . . . it was my iPod ( 60 GB ) back up.
:dunno:
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> How do I clone the contents of a 750gb drive to a 300gb drive?
If you've got less than 300Gb of data on the 750Gb drive, it's easy! 
(Actually, you'd have to allow for false-advertising-overhead so it'd have to be less than 279GB to back it up to the average 300GB drive.)
...Or you could selectively exclude some non-system files/folders. Carbon Copy Cloner makes that easy.
...Or you could just back up your home folder to that drive. Both CCC and SuperDuper will do that for you and can be used to make scheduled/automated backups.
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GeneL wrote:
B L, thanks for the thought, but I'm still wondering if there could have been any other damage to my computer, which might show up at some later date? I'm really puzzled about why only the one drive was affected, so far. My oldest drive, the one that came installed with the computer wasn't loused up, so what do you think happened?
Gene, there is no other damage to anything.
Some sort of power glitch happened while an important sector of the drive was being written to, or a cable or the enclosure's power cord got jiggled at the wrong moment when the desk was shook at the wrong moment (do you lean on the desk to get up out of your chair by chance?), and the directory got hosed.
Happens to the best of us, and once reformatted the drives live happily ever after.
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B L, other than being installed in a bay, the drive was not in use for anything, True, its icon was showing on the desktop, but would that qualify as "being written to?" I wasn't anywhere near the computer when it went off. This sure is a mystery to me.
Anyway, thanks for the reassurance.
It was good to hear from you. Are you going to post about your trip?
"Things to do in Portland in 4 hours on a workday afternoon?" http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1...msg-574648
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