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Guide - Fusion Drive using tonymacx86 Tools & Chimera

hi neil,

i've wacthed the video tutorial of tomas villegas "create your own apple fusion drive", http://youtu.be/aPw5Wgfflco
follow the instructions several times (FAILED) and apparently what he (tomas villegas) said in the comment section is true: There are reports of a hardware issue with early 2011 MacBook Pros!!.
He also said: At this point all we can do is hope they issue a firmware update that will fix this issue and all in apple hands now.

i am still wondering if that is true??, can you confirm that issue neil :)

many thanks,

dre

Btw, i have the same laptop as above mention: MBP 13" early 2011, Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.7 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 8 GB
OSX mountain Lion 8.2
 
I'm at a loss... I've followed this guide, and a few others based off of this guide, and I think I'm really close...

BUT I can't get Chimera to show me the Fusion Drive partition. I have Chimera installed (manually) to both "Boot OS X" partitions on each of the drives that make up my Fusion Drive, and Chimera boots just as it should. I've tested to make sure I'm not getting a different boot partition by changing themes and such, so I know I'm booting from the first drive in my Fusion setup, but when Chimera finishes loading, it doesn't show me the "Boot OS X" partitions... so I can't boot into my installation.

The kicker is that I had this working a week ago, and had time machine make a backup of this Fusion Setup, but restoring it doesn't setup the "Boot OS X" partition properly... And I vaguely remember there being more folders than just the Extra folder, but I can't remember what I did... There was a usr folder, and maybe a System folder or library folder. I'm just not really sure how I set it up, and now I can't get it to work.
 
I'm at a loss... I've followed this guide, and a few others based off of this guide, and I think I'm really close...

Here's a brief update, although still no success. I attempted to boot without having any drives except the two fusion disks attached to the motherboard, and it booted from the SSD, and gave me the option to the "Boot OS X" partition...

At first it fed back "can't find mach_kernel", which I resolved by using the KernelCache option. But then after reboot it would start again and just stop at loading the kernel cache.

I don't remember what I did the first time I set this up, but booting the fusion setup is trickier than I anticipated.
 
I give up. Here's where I'm leaving it.

I created my Fusion Drive (per the guide), copied the boot, boot0, and boot1h files to the respective partitions (the "Boot OS X" partitions, 0s3 & 2s3) as well as the Extra folder (with the modified boot.plist), restored my data from a Time Machine backup of a known working setup, but I still couldn't boot.

Chimera nor Chameleon recognize the "Boot OS X" partitions when loading, so I can only boot into a backup installation (which is on a third and separate drive). I decided to tinker around with the "Boot OS X" partitions by copying over some of the files from the /System/Library[b/] folders of my backup installation (mainly the Caches folder), as well as some files from the /usr folder and the /Library folder. Adding this stuff got Chimera to display the "Boot OS X" partitions as boot selections, but they still wouldn't go.

Slowly but surely, I debugged the issue by booting verbose. Initially I had the "can't find mach_kernel" issue, which I fixed by either putting mach_kernel in the root of both helper partitions, or putting the kernel cache file into appropriate the /System/Library/Caches/... subfolder... At this point, when I rebooted I got a KP from the "can't find driver for this platform /ACPI" error...

I'm stuck at this, and I've run out of patience. The part that kills me to most is that I had this all setup a week ago! I just don't remember exactly how I did it, or why the additional folders were on the helper partitions, but now I'm totally stuck.

Also, I actually did at one point boot into the Fusion Drive setup (I know because 1. I had a different background image 2. The Fusion Drive was listed first on my desktop, and 3. The Fusion Drive was listed as my boot device in system info). I have a backup USB installer with Chameleon on it, and I thought I was selecting my backup OS X installation to boot, but when it came to the desktop, I was in my Fusion Drive. It was the ultimate tease!! I poked around to see what was loaded, and everything looked exactly they way I had it before I screwed it up... But when I went to reboot and booted from the USB installer, I selected the same drive (again, which was labeled as my backup installation), and it didn't boot from the Fusion Drive, and actually did boot into my backup.

For anyone who made it this far... thanks for reading my rant.

TL;DR The only reason my Fusion Drive doesn't work is because I can't boot into it...
 
I'm new on this forum, but not new to OS X, so I thought I'd make something useful!
So here's a bash script that automates the creation of a fusion drive for you!

It's not fully complete, but I've included a script updater so if you use it and there's an update, it'll do that for you!
I might make my own thread later on, but for now this one is enough.
Please test it and give me feedback! :)

Download
If you get a permission error, in Terminal:
Code:
chmod +x [Drag Script Here]
 
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.
 
You should be able to move the drives around without any problems because the Fusion Drive is created by the OS, that identifies the drives with their unique identifier. You can see that by running:
Code:
diskutil cs list

It mentions something like "Device Identifier" (might not be exactly that, as it's from the top of my head).
Also I made a Fusion Drive with USB sticks, and can move them around my ports without any problems!
 
Hey IT WOOOOOORKS! Can't believe I'm typing from my shiny fusion drive right now. Everything feels so much faster.
One thing though, i ran diskutil list in terminal one more time and was surprised with the results.

/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 499.8 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *120.0 GB disk1
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 119.7 GB disk1s2
3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk1s3
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_HFS Fusion Drive *616.5 GB disk2

disk0 is the 500GB HDD and disk1 is the 120GB SSD!!
Did I do something wrong? Is the OS installed on the HDD?? Again, everything feels snappy, so...
Anyone else found this issue?

Edit: Actually before doing the fusion process, the numbers of the drives were the same. Should they have changed when fused?

Edit 2: Well, NOW they've changed. The SSD is disk0 and the HDD is disk1. Weird.

PS: Thanks for the tutorial, man. Keep up the good work.
 
Anybody tried the script from iDoctor?
 
Will be trying this out, hope it goes well :) thanks Neil
 
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