The replacement RAM, new hard drive and external hard drive enclosure all arrived today on the same UPS shipment – I love it when everything comes together like that. I guess I’ll be playing with hardware this afternoon.
The plan:
- Install new RAM and make sure it works.
- Put new Hitatchi HD in external enclosure.
- Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my current RAID HD to the new external HD.
- Boot from external HD – make sure all looks right.
- Use Disk Utility to reformat the stock Western Digital HD.
- Use CCC to copy the external HD to the WD HD.
- Boot from the WD HD, make sure all looks right.
- Swap the WD HD and the new Hitatchi HD in the internal/external spots.
- Use Disk Utility to RAID the 2 internal Hitatchi drives.
- Use CCC to copy the external WD drive back to the new RAID set-up.
What could possibly go wrong?
UPDATE: That didn’t take long… I unpacked everything and discovered that I can’t put the SATA drive into this enclosure. Doh! Looks like my best local options are a 100GB Seagate HD for $40 after rebate or a 250GB Hitatchi for $130 after rebate. It’s like Scott told me a while back:
We solve these problems, you know, with money.
It’s a business expense anyway…
UPDATE #2: Well, the RAM is installed, and everything came up ok – but I only show 2.5GB of RAM, the same as before I added the additional 2GB. The slots that have the new RAM show as empty… time to call OWC again I guess.
UPDATE #3: Yep, bad RAM… again! Another RMA, etc. Also, I discovered that my Kensington keyboard won’t work for those “hold down the * key when booting up…” situations – I had to use the Apple keyboard.
i may be spend a day or so playing with hardware soon myself. gear lust has gotten the better of me: i put in an order for a dualie G5 last night. it’ll be a while before it gets here, so i haven’t ordered ram or a display yet. i’m hoping to catch some nice deal on a dell 24″. =)
I was watching prices for a while, you can get the Dell 24″ for ~$800-900 if you’re patient. If you want to throw in a PC at the same time, it’s about $300 more. 🙂
Cloning in Progress
I bought the 100GB Seagate drive for $40 (after rebate from Circut City) and I’m going to use that as my intermediate disk to replace the WD drive with the Hitatchi in my RAID array. I only have ~65GB to transfer, so the Seagate will work just f…
RAM Install, Take 3
After the RAM failed the first two times I tried to get it all installed, I wasn’t too optimistic when I received my second set of RMA’d DIMMs today. So far, things seem to be working ok with the additional RAM.
My saga went something lik…