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herbsman · May 9, 2011, 06:51 PM

Hello,

I have a mac mini server with dual 500 gb HDs running on the Mac OS X SW RAID1 mirror. I need to upgrade the mini and just received some 1TB HDs, so I want to image my current SW RAID over to dual 1TB HDs.

What is the best way to do this?

Is it possible to just remove one of the 500gb HDs in the mini and image it to another mac and then re-image back to the 1tb HD?

besson3c · May 9, 2011, 10:21 PM

There are probably a few ways you can do this, but if you have some sort of backup disk where you could backup your 500 GB, you could setup the 1TB mirror and then copy the data back.

What I'm unclear about in OS X is whether you can grow partitions after imaging a 500 GB disk and cloning this disk onto a larger disk, in your case a 1TB disk?

P · May 10, 2011, 06:21 AM

Originally Posted by besson3c

What I'm unclear about in OS X is whether you can grow partitions after imaging a 500 GB disk and cloning this disk onto a larger disk, in your case a 1TB disk?

You can from 10.5 and on, but you may have to be booted from the install disk.

herbsman · May 10, 2011, 09:49 AM

I'm imaging the mini right now. Looks like the target mac sees the mini's dual HDs as a RAIDmirror set which I didn't think it would, so that's good to know.

I'll re-image the end result onto a dual 1TB RAID mirror and will post the results shortly

THanks to everyone!

herbsman · May 11, 2011, 03:45 PM

Well, looks like my experiment has been cut short. The 1TB 2.5" HDs are quite a bit thicker than the 500gb standard size thickness 2.5 HDs so they don't even fit inside the mac mini server.

I spent an hour taking the thing apart and I kind of knew it probably wouldn't fit but took it as a learning experience. I'll be getting dual 750gb HDs instead and will do it all over again

The main thing I learned from this:

When you target disk mode a Mac OS X system with a RAID1 mirror setup via Mac OS X Disk Utility, it is actually recognized as a RAID1 set when plugged into a separate target Mac via Firewire. Imaging the RAID set worked fine.

When the dual 750s come in, I'll install those into the mini and will format the HDs as a RAID1 set. Afterwards ill attempt to use the image I built from the dual500s and image it onto the dual750s. I don't imagine there will be a problem with partition size given that it works perfectly fine with standard Mac OS X images. But I guess we shall see about that