- Joined
- Feb 21, 2016
- Messages
- 5
- Motherboard
- MSI Z97 PC Mate
- CPU
- i7-4790K
- Graphics
- GeForce 740 GT
- Mac
- Classic Mac
- Mobile Phone
This is part of a long story with my one and only build. I'm trying to keep this relatively brief, but there is a lot of background here. Please bear with me. I swear this is the short version (my entire CustoMac experience has been very frustrating). The TL;DR version is in bold:
I made the mistake of running Migration Assistant on my then-running El Capitan build, from my 2008 MBP's Time Machine, and even though I thought I had it set to only bring over data files (documents, videos, pictures, music, etc.), it somehow copied countless system settings, the entire user account, etc. It auto-logged-in to the copied old user account, Snow Leopard desktop image, and more. And I lost audio after spending weeks figuring out how to get the audio working, including working audio after sleep. So frustrating! Oh well, I'll just restore from the Time Machine, right?
And then it failed to boot. From anything. I couldn't boot from the system drive (in regular, verbose, or safe modes), I couldn't boot from the recovery partition, and I couldn't boot from the thumb drive. Apparently no way in. I tried and tried to study up on the issues, such as where it hangs in verbose mode, but eventually I had to leave it like that for 3+ months until I finished other projects and could get back to it now (all the while my $2K investment reminding me every time I walked past of the zero ROI I was getting, or worse, whenever my wife walked past). Now I'm not sure if everything from that previous install is junk and I should just start over or what. And my MBP wasn't even working anymore so I didn't have any other way to edit anything.
My brother gave me an old MBA with a cracked screen, so now I have another option (using an external display). I cloned my main system drive (500 gig SSD) to a .dmg on another drive. I then installed my 2x2TB RAID 0 main data drives in a USB 2.0 drive toaster and they mounted just fine. Everything seems to be working great there. Great! Now if my 2x5TB RAID 1 Time Machine volume is still working I should be able to wipe the system drive, boot from a new Unibeast-built thumb drive installer, and restore from the Time Machine volume.
But it won't mount. It recognizes both physical drives connected, but not their logical volumes. And it reports that they are 600-something GB drives rather than 5 TB drives. Identical capacities reported, and identical behavior overall. Seems to me like a hardware failure is unlikely. (These were all internal drives in my build, btw. I hate using external enclosures and connections.)
How does that happen? And can it be corrected? It would GREATLY simplify things for me if I can recover from the time machine record stored on these drives, due to software licensing issues. I didn't think to de-authorize some software before that last restart after Migration Assistant (didn't think I would need to), and as I did the "de-authorize every other computer associated with this account" option already after my MBP died, I can't do that again until 1 year after the last such operation (February 2017). So I'm locked out until then if I can't restore from Time Machine, WHICH IS THE WHOLE POINT OF TIME MACHINE, not to mention the whole point of having a RAID 1 volume as the Time Machine. Shouldn't I at least have one working half of the RAID from which I could rebuild the array?
I am so frustrated with this. Thank you for any help and/or point in the right direction you can provide!
I made the mistake of running Migration Assistant on my then-running El Capitan build, from my 2008 MBP's Time Machine, and even though I thought I had it set to only bring over data files (documents, videos, pictures, music, etc.), it somehow copied countless system settings, the entire user account, etc. It auto-logged-in to the copied old user account, Snow Leopard desktop image, and more. And I lost audio after spending weeks figuring out how to get the audio working, including working audio after sleep. So frustrating! Oh well, I'll just restore from the Time Machine, right?
And then it failed to boot. From anything. I couldn't boot from the system drive (in regular, verbose, or safe modes), I couldn't boot from the recovery partition, and I couldn't boot from the thumb drive. Apparently no way in. I tried and tried to study up on the issues, such as where it hangs in verbose mode, but eventually I had to leave it like that for 3+ months until I finished other projects and could get back to it now (all the while my $2K investment reminding me every time I walked past of the zero ROI I was getting, or worse, whenever my wife walked past). Now I'm not sure if everything from that previous install is junk and I should just start over or what. And my MBP wasn't even working anymore so I didn't have any other way to edit anything.
My brother gave me an old MBA with a cracked screen, so now I have another option (using an external display). I cloned my main system drive (500 gig SSD) to a .dmg on another drive. I then installed my 2x2TB RAID 0 main data drives in a USB 2.0 drive toaster and they mounted just fine. Everything seems to be working great there. Great! Now if my 2x5TB RAID 1 Time Machine volume is still working I should be able to wipe the system drive, boot from a new Unibeast-built thumb drive installer, and restore from the Time Machine volume.
But it won't mount. It recognizes both physical drives connected, but not their logical volumes. And it reports that they are 600-something GB drives rather than 5 TB drives. Identical capacities reported, and identical behavior overall. Seems to me like a hardware failure is unlikely. (These were all internal drives in my build, btw. I hate using external enclosures and connections.)
How does that happen? And can it be corrected? It would GREATLY simplify things for me if I can recover from the time machine record stored on these drives, due to software licensing issues. I didn't think to de-authorize some software before that last restart after Migration Assistant (didn't think I would need to), and as I did the "de-authorize every other computer associated with this account" option already after my MBP died, I can't do that again until 1 year after the last such operation (February 2017). So I'm locked out until then if I can't restore from Time Machine, WHICH IS THE WHOLE POINT OF TIME MACHINE, not to mention the whole point of having a RAID 1 volume as the Time Machine. Shouldn't I at least have one working half of the RAID from which I could rebuild the array?
I am so frustrated with this. Thank you for any help and/or point in the right direction you can provide!