[brza]

I'll put it in bullet form, because in a proper paragraph was wayyyy too confusing for others to gather all the info and make sense.

- I have two hard drives. the main one, and the second one. main one = my main boot drive, but they've both been bootable (second one just had a skeleton install of the OS to save room but make it bootable for emergencies)

- i was backing up the main hard drive onto the second drive using Carbon Copy Cloner (which, i believe, uses rsync in the process). It finished the copying and was at the very end when it unexpectedly crashed.

- I ran Disk Repair and it said it had a volume header error and couldn't be fixed.

- I restarted, and now I found that I could mount both hrad drives just fine, BUT ONLY ONE AT A TIME. In other words, if I want to use the second hard drive, I have to unplug the main's IDE cable.

- As a friend pointed out, low-level data could've been copied as well and caused the computer to think that it's attempting to mount the same volume from two locations and sees that as problematic. However, I know for sure that the volume name of the second drive was retained in this whole process.

[steve626]

I suggest you post this issue at the CCC forum at Mike's Mac OS X Management Software and Tips: Home where several experts (baltwo, andreas and sometimes bombich himself) respond quickly to questions such as yours ...

[brza]

I'll give it a shot, thanks

For anyone else who might know more, I should add: I just reformatted (zeroed it completely) the source drive. So now I have two hard drives that work just fine, independently, but I can't have them both connected. Not MOUNTED, I can't even have the ide cables in... seems there's still a conflict (despite zeroing the drive..?)

Also, i booted up twice: once for each drive, into single user mode, and checked a detail: both use "/dev/disk0s10" for the device path. i dont know if that's the one for the startup disk - that is, if I boot using ANY volume, would it use that device path? There are two ends to the ide cable, and I don't use the same one for both drives. So it's not like the drive's are being connected by the same IDE cable. Which means they SHOULD use different device paths.