I am glad so many are finding the guide of some use.
I would like to share that I was surprised this last weekend when I tried to boot my Fusion lab machine and it would not boot to the Fusion drive(s). When I booted from the third drive in the system, Disk Utility indicated an error on the Fusion drive and ask if I want to recover the drive... I backed out and shut the machine down. looked inside and found that I had a disconnected power cable to the hard drive in the Fusion set. Reconnected the power and the system happily booted to the Fusion drive set.
The conclusion that I drew from this misadventure is that the system if more tolerant of my goof up then I would have expected.
neil
Hello Neil,
I'have followed your guide almost to the letter, except that instead of copying the system from a previous installation, I decided to install from scratch.
Creating the Fusion drive went smoothly, so did installing the system. It was tricky to boot into the new system after the installation completed, but strangely enough it works whenever I chose another drive to boot from.
Anyway, my issue is the following: Even after copying the boot files into the Boot OS X partitions, doing the fdisk and the dd commands from terminal, copying the Extra folder to both Boot OS X partitions, I still can't boot from the Fusion Drive without going into the bios. Doesn't matter if I user the Kernel Cache option, I end up with that boot0 error, mentioned by a few people previously.
I've made a few mistakes along the way, but I don't think any of those are related to the problem, but I'll post them here in order to reassure people that it might still work even if you:
- connect the ssd and the hdd using different interface speeds (like 6Gb/s for he ssd and 3Gb/s for the hdd)
- install the system from scratch. the problem here is that after you install the system, you need to make sure that you choose all the good options in multibeast on the first go. if you mess up in a way that prevents you from booting, it gets harder to correct along the way (although you can always prepare a USB drive, with your system and some additional goodies, like kexts extracted from multibeast, chimera files, etc).
Anyway, after some extensive reading, I found out that my boot0 problem has something to do with my hdd choice, a 3TB WD Caviar green, whose firmware apparently is not compatible with Chimera. Indeed, although the boot partitions for both the SSD and the HDD have been fiddled with from terminal, when I chose to boot from the ssd from the bios, everything works, but when I choose to boot from the hdd, I get the boot0 error.
Now, somehow the bios does not allow me to pick the ssd when defining the boot order (not the boot option, but the pre-defined order). The motherboard is an Asus P8Z77-M Pro and has 6 SATA connectors, 2 of which are 6Gb/s and the others are 3Gb/s. The ssd is connected to P1 and the hdd is connected to P5. Beats me why the ssd is not a choice and beats me even more why it appears in the "Boot Options" menu (which contains more options for boot devices).
So there you go, I am struggling at the moment to tell the mobo "please start from the ssd automatically", but it will not allow me.
My next attempt will be to change the position of the sata connectors, but I am scared to mess up with the fusion drive.
Has anyone ever tried to change the sata connectos after deploying the fusion drive? Is it bound by identifiers placed in each physical drive, or is it bound by the device connectos (disk2, disk3, etc).
Any help would be welcome, even (and even more so) if it challenges the stuff I stated previously.
Thanks in advance.