This thread will probably end up archived somewhere, so I'll just tie
up the loose end and report how the installation and restoration of
the second disk went, for anyone who may be faced with doing this in
the future.
To continue the above, after the new replacement for the dead drive
ran reliably for a few days, and everything on it worked fine, it was
time to replace the other (still working) drive, just as preventative
medicine, since they were both five years old.
The replacement and restoration of the data on the second drive went,
like the first one, with only minor hitches. As with the first one, I
first replaced the old drive in the Mac with the new one, paying no
attention to any settings on the new drive itself such as master/slave
or "cable select" as I'd had to do with drives in the older Macs.
Apparently with these new SATA drives in G5 Macs or newer, you just
ignore all that stuff and slap 'em in there, just as they come out of
he box, and they work fine.
Then I fired up the Mac using the Leopard installer disk with the C
key held down, and after the disk took control (and it makes you
choose a language, like an ATM machine), I went up to the Utilities
menu and chose Disk Utility and initialized the drive with it, giving
it exactly the same name as the drive it replaced ("Internal 500").
When that was done, I picked "Restore from Backups" from the same
utilities menu, and it then asks you to choose a Time Machine backup
to restore from (my Time Machine is an external 1 TB drive plugged
into the front of the G5).
Once again, the backups for both drives were double-listed in the
Choose window for some reason, once with an OS number and once
without, like this: "Internal 500" and "Internal 500 10.4.11," and
"Internal 1000" and "Internal 1000 10.5.6." Here was the first little
error made by the utility, because both drives had 10.5.6 on them, and
neither one had 10.4.11. No matter, I chose "Internal 500," which was
the original name of the drive being replaced.
Then the installer asked me to choose a disk to restore the data to,
and here the second little glitch appeared, because the newly
initialed drive was not listed in the window. I decided to restart the
Mac to see if it would appear, but Restart was grayed out under the
Apple menu, so I backed up through the Utility's windows (hitting the
"Back" button on each window) until I came to the first one, but
"Restart" was still grayed out. So I went the other way, and repeated
the process of choosing a drive to restore from and to, and the second
time it asked me what drive I wanted to restore to, the new drive
appeared in the list. Glitch fixed, somehow.
I chose the new drive and hit Restore, and four hours later (during
which time a Time Machine window sat on the monitor with "Restoring"
at the top and a progress bar slowly filling up at the bottom) I had a
complete working copy of the original drive, which boots up and runs
exactly like it. And all is well. Pretty soon I'll have Time Machine
make a complete new backup of both drives, and then I'll be back where
was from before the old drive failed.
The two new hard drives run very quietly, and Hitachi thinks they'll
continue to run for at least five years, judging from their warranty,
so I'm sitting pretty at the moment.
Time Machine has proven to me that it is capable of restoring a big
hard drive after a complete failure, and I intend to keep it on the
job from now on, doing its hourly backups. It's a great safety feature
for a guy like me who is too lazy and absentminded to do frequent
backups otherwise.
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