Guide - Fusion Drive using tonymacx86 Tools & Chimera

[kiwisincebirth]

Maverick Upgrade Procedure ?0) Make a backup of current install
1) Follow full Unibeast guide (http://www.tonymacx86.com/374-unibeast-install-os-x-mavericks-any-supported-intel-based-pc.html) to upgrade to Mavericks, except at the last point DO-NOT reboot.
2) Proceed with the fusion drive creation (in the original guide) from the Completion of the SuperDupa disk cloning, where it says "The task ahead is to make the Fusion Drive bootable"
3) Remove USB drive and re-boot as normal.

I know this sound obvious, just checking?[\QUOTE]So this is how I did it and it worked for me.

 

[kiwisincebirth]

Is it really necessary to put chimera on both of the disks? Has anyone tried it on just one? Is there a way to remove chimera from one of the disks? I'd be willing to test this.

I just have a feeling it's not necessary because the disk the motherboard is told to boot from seems to be the /extra folder that matters. For instance, if I change the chimera theme I have to change the /extra folder on the SSD (which the motherboard looks for).

If we didn't need it on both disks then we wouldn't have the fusion drive twice in the list...

Probably not necessary, but adding it doesn't take up any space, since the partitions are already there, and adding it is only a couple of commands.

In my installation I ONLY install the /Extra folder onto my SSD boot partition without issue. It simplifies maintaing these files, as only have a single copy to do. The one time (for some reason) the bios booted my HDD (without /Extra folder), it came up with default boot menu, so was very obvious.

 

[PencilNotPen]

Hello, I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice with a problem I am having. I am trying to create a Fusion Drive out of SSD and HDD, but with a Recovery partition for Find My Mac. In theory it should be possible, as the Fusion Drive allows one extra partition outside of the LVG, but I have had some difficulties. If I follow this guide to successfully set up an FD, and subsequently resize the LVG and add a Recovery HD, Repairing the Disk seems to wipe it again, which is clearly not a stable setup.
If I follow a more vanilla method for FD and Recovery HD, partitioning the HDD first for a Recovery and one other partition, and then making an FD of the SSD and the non-recovery-partition on the HDD, it seems to succeed up to a point, but I then run into difficulties. The creation process in this case only creates one Boot OS X partition (presumably for the SSD, could it assume that the Recovery HD will do the job of Boot OS X for the HDD or something?) How can I make the drive set bootable with only one Boot OS X? Should I try writing the boot files to the Recovery HD (can't imagine that would work), or write them to the only one Boot OS X partition I have?

@Hackmodford, did you try out your suggestion with only one of your boot os x partitions being written to? It occurs to me that if that works, I might be able to get away with only having the boot files on one Boot OS X partition after all, solving my problem.

Thanks

 

[Hackmodford]

Probably not necessary, but adding it doesn't take up any space, since the partitions are already there, and adding it is only a couple of commands.

In my installation I ONLY install the /Extra folder onto my SSD boot partition without issue. It simplifies maintaing these files, as only have a single copy to do. The one time (for some reason) the bios booted my HDD (without /Extra folder), it came up with default boot menu, so was very obvious.

I'm not worried about drive space. What I would like to do is remove the dual entry in the boot menu. I don't need my OS to show up as two raid disks that can be booted.

 

[PencilNotPen]

For anyone who wants to create a Fusion Drive WITH a Recovery HD for Find My Mac etc, I have successfully managed this on my hack. Instructions here:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-h...partition-working-find-my-mac.html#post767382

 

[valiant66]

Neil,
My only question is this. The Extra folder that I copied to my two helper partitions is not the same Extra folder that now resides on the Fusion volume - which was simply a clone of the original boot environment. If I want to make changes to the Extra folder or to the plist file, which one am i editing? And should i be keeping all three in sync? So any change to the hackintosh setup has to be pushed out to the hidden helper partitions?

I'd like to know the answer to this, too. I have definitely confirmed that if you make changes to the Extras folder at the root of a fusion drive, they do not have any effect. (In my case, I was messing around with Theme files.) The changes need to be made to the Extras folder in the hidden helper partitions.

I have a working Mountain Lion install, with a 120 GB SSD and a 1 TB HD, and I'm thinking about updating it to Mavericks. However, I'm worried about those helper partitions, and what jiggery-pokery I need to perform on them to get Mavericks to work as expected. For now, I'm staying with ML, but I'd like to know if anybody has any advice for when I do upgrade the OS.

Thanks.

 

[PencilNotPen]

You are correct, you always need to copy any changes to /Extra folder on the Boot OS X partitions for them to have any effect. I wrote a script that mounts them, copies the /Extra folder over and unmounts them to speed up the process once, I'll let you know if I find it. As far as upgrading goes, I would probably start fresh, copying over the boot files from the newest version of Chimera to your FD set (as per this guide) so as to avoid any problems.
Alternatively, if you used a fairly new version of Chimera to set up the FD in the first place (i.e. the boot files are reasonably new), then you can probably leave them as they are. In that case, you could set up a Mavericks install on a separate drive, get it working, and then clone it straight onto your FD, copying only the /Extra folder to the two helper partitions.

 

[boomslang20117]

is it really necessary to add "rd=uuid boot-uuid=" in the boot.plist? would it work if i didn't add that in? the last time i added that in, i could not sign into iCloud at all.

 

[blurble]

Thanks for an excellent guide.


One thing that tripped me up though, on reboot to the fusion drive I was getting a kernel panic. Turned out it was due to an add in card ( dual port intel nic ) and I had to ...

remove it from the system
run multi beast and rebuild whatever multi beast builds
( reboot to check that went ok, probably not necessary )
reinstall the card in my box
reboot to happiness

didn't see this mentioned so it's probably obvious to everyone but utter newbies like me.

 

[valiant66]

FWIW You only need the Boot OS X partition on one of the two drives making up your fusion drive. After much jiggery-pokery I managed to have the Boot OS X partition on the SSD drive and a Recovery HD partition on the HD.

[FONT=Menlo]$ diskutil list[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]/dev/disk0[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *120.0 GB   disk0[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         119.7 GB   disk0s2[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk0s3[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]/dev/disk1[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *3.0 TB     disk2[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         3.0 TB     disk2s2[/FONT]
[FONT=Menlo]   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk2s3[/FONT]

It took a lot of retries, so I wouldn't recommend setting up the Recovery HD partition unless you've got lots of time on your hands or absolutely NEED the Find My Mac feature.

However, setting up the Boot OS X partition to only be on your SSD makes things a little easier for ongoing maintenance.