[rkv]

Sorry for the length of this post. I will briefly state the problem and then provide additional details for those that have interest in reading on.

After upgrading my home directory disk on a MacPro3,1 under 10.7.1 to a RAID 1 Mirror using "Disk Utility" this past weekend, several items appear to be broken. The first I noticed was that a search in Apple Mail was not finding all of the mail messages. If I changed the sorting on the message summary panel I could see the message and even though it was an IMAP account I could select it and display the message even when disconnected from the internet. Yesterday, I discovered that none of my Microsoft Office 2011 applications will run due to their believing they are not licensed. When I try to apply the license key it tells me that I have exceeded the number of machines on which I am authorized. With my MacPro I am at the maximum of three allowed by the license. My assumption is that MS licensing believes my MacPro with the RAID 1 configuration is a different and fourth machine. I suspect both of these issues are due to the process by which I added the RAID 1 mirror. I have also noticed that Safari seems to have lost keychain information, ids and passwords. I don't believe there were any other changes. I am interested in any suggestions as to how to correct the situation?

---------- the longer version ------------------

Now for the longer more detailed version of the changes I have made and the process by which they were implemented.
This started when Lion

When Lion was released I simultaneously upgraded my MacPro3,1 to have the system on a SSD while leaving my home directory on the original Boot HD. I did this at the time I upgraded to Lion so that if I booted from the SSD I booted 10.7 and if I booted from my old HD I booted 10.6. After installing Lion on the SSD I used migration assistant to move the applications to that version of OS X. However, I did not use the migration assistant to move any of the user data. Rather, I used the "Advance Options" pane of the "Users & Groups" System Preferences to direct the path of the home directory to my original home directory of my old disk. I also made sure that Everything with that upgrade seemed to work as planned.It appeared that I could boot under 10.7 or 10.6 and I was seeing all of the same files. I did this on the 23rd July. The system has been solid since that date. The only issues I had were with Default Folder X causing various crashes. After upgrading Default Folder X my MacPro has been very stable.

I tried to implement phase two of my upgrade this past weekend. Initially my MacPro had four independent volumes. This was two 500GB drives and two 1TB drives. This was one disk for my original home directory, another two disks for various files, and one 1TB drive for Time Machine. The SSD used OWC's optical bay installation kit. I purchased four 2TB drives with the plan of having two RAID 1 Mirrors. One 2TB Mirror for my home directory and other files and another 2TB Mirror for Time Machine. I originally had planned on 3TB drives but ultimately decided I didn't need that much storage yet and that I would wait until I needed the additional storage. I think it is the Time Machine Mirror which will most likely need to be upgraded to a larger volume.

I upgraded by removing all four of the original drives and installing four 2TB drives. I then used Disk Utility to create the RAID 1 Mirror volumes. After doing this, I initially copied the contents of my original TimeMachine disk using Disk Utility. After this stage I did test that I could use Time Machine's Finder view to see the file system as it existed at a point in the past. I could.

I then used Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.2 to copy my original 10.6 boot volume with my original home directory to the new 2TB Volume. In order to do this, I first booted from the SSD (OS X 10.7.1) when the home directory volume was not mounted. This means that OS X found that I did not have a home directory and reverted to the original, which I had never used, on the SSD along with the remainder of the OS. Please note this step may have caused some of my subsequent problems. Specifically, since the home directory clone took seven or eight hours, I believe I started both Mail and Safari while I was in the state where my real home directory was not mounted but being copied. I suspect this may have caused Mail and Safari to initialize in some fashion which caused subsequent issues.

Also note that I used CCC rather than a Time Capsule restore for two reasons, I wanted to be able to still boot in 10.6 and up to this point in time, due to disk space limitations, I had excluded significant portions of my home directory which I backed up separately. Principally, 115GB of iTunes, and 170GB of Pictures managed by iPhoto or Aperture. I am planning on doing an extensive reorganization of my files and wanted to get as much as possible in Time Machine before attempting the reorg.

Once both Mirror Volumes were fully populated with the information which had been on the original disks. I confirmed that account settings still pointed to the volume name and folder which were now on the mirror volume. They did so I rebooted. After rebooting from the SSD the file system looked like I expected it to look. That is all my folders were there. I then turned on Time Machine. Previously, due to limited disk space I had not been allowing Time Machine to track changes to the System folders and the like. I changed the configuration so that the contents of the SSD were now included. I then let Time Machine do it's thing where it told me it was going to copy ~450GB of information.

At this point I thought I was done and everything was working. Note my new home directory and Time Machine mirror volumes each had the same volume name that they did when they were a single drive. The first problem seemed to be with Time Machine. Once it had completed. The calendar on the right hand side of the Time Machine Finder View showed dates going back to November 2009. However, when I tried to go back in time I had mixed results. Sometimes it would go back and other times it would seem like it could not. However, that I believe was due to my default finder settings including "size" and "calculate all sizes". When I went far in the past it was simply taking too long to calculate the sizes. For the moment, I now believe Time Machine to be working and intact in that it has all of my file system back to 2009.

The next thing I noticed was that Mail was not finding emails which were in my inbox when I entered a search string in the Mail.app search field input box. I have four iMap accounts, two of which are large. One having ~10GB of messages and the other around 2.5GB of messages. All of the messages and their attachments are normally cached on my MacPro. In the case of my Inbox, I knew the messages were actually on my MacPro. I could disconnect from the internet and browse to the message by using the scroll bar for the message summary pane of Mail. When I select the message it would fully display even though the computer was disconnected from the internet. In the case of my Inbox because it held a small number of messages I was able to do a rebuild and now seem to be able to search for messages. However, I have not nor do I want to have to rebuild every mailbox. In part this is also due to limitations my email vendor has in place. In particular, 10GBs is well in excess of my monthly bandwidth allowance. I figured I would need to research Mail.app configuration issues to see what may have been mangled.

The next issue and the one which triggered this post is the all of my Microsoft Office 2011 applications stopped working due to the aforementioned licensing issues. I only use these when I have to. Unfortunately, my work environment is such that I receive many Word and Powerpoint files which I must use or modify while in the form. I can't simply import to Pages or Keynote.

The good news is that I do have the original disks and they are unmodified so that I can repeat any steps where I may have done the wrong thing. Although, given the time frames for moving some of this data around I am hoping that I do not have to redo it all.

Any thoughts comments or suggestions? To repeat, my key issues are (1) Why does Microsoft Office think I am on a different machine? All volumes have their same volume names and user account names. And, (2) Any thoughts as to how this process mucked up Mails indexes so that it can not find messages using the search field? A mailbox by mailbox rebuild is not really the desirable fix if it can be avoided.

Thanks and sorry for being so long winded but hopefully having all of the facts will be helpful in framing any advice you may be able to offer.

[Waragainstsleep]

1) Office, like everything Microsoft does is a giant pain in the ass when it comes to licensing. There should be a way to fix this, even if it involves calling a helpline of some kind.

2) Have you tried deleting your envelope index? G into ~/Library/Mail/ and trash the envelope index then relaunch Mail. That might fix it.

[rkv]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

1) Office, like everything Microsoft does is a giant pain in the ass when it comes to licensing. There should be a way to fix this, even if it involves calling a helpline of some kind.

Yes, I believe if I hung out on the phone enough that there is some chance that they will give me new license keys. That's my planned last resort. For Office 2011, Microsoft changed their license enforcement mechanisms and I believe something I did has mucked with that. I tend not to use Office for anything which I originate, but it's a necessary evil of my work environment.

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

2) Have you tried deleting your envelope index? G into ~/Library/Mail/ and trash the envelope index then relaunch Mail. That might fix it.

I believe that would cause Mail to want to completely repopulate the caches for the IMAP based email accounts, all of mine. This would be well in excess of 12GB in aggregate and would exceed my mail servers bandwidth allowances. I would like to correct, particularly since I still have the original disk which works just fine if I boot 10.6 from it. So I am hoping that I can use a two week old archive as the starting point rather than having to reinitialise all my mail accounts.

[Waragainstsleep]

Are your messages stored locally or do you keep them on the server? I always sync my IMAP accounts for offline perusal. If yours are stored locally then deleting the envelope index won't touch your bandwidth allowance.