2 harddrives puzzle

Bear with me, this gets confusing...

I just upgraded to Panther the other day and am having some issues with my harddrives and the OS. This is the route I took:

- Originally had OS 9.2 on one harddrive (Drive A), the only drive in the system.

- Installed a second drive (Drive B) as a slave, copied everything from A to B including the OS data (System folder, etc.) so B was an exact duplicate of A.

- Installed OS X on Drive B, which then made a backup copy of 9.2 (so I had OS 9.2 on Drive A, a storage folder that I made on Drive B with the OS and all files, and the 9.2 system folder the OS X install made on Drive B).

- Set Drive B as the startup drive for 9.2 (still needed to work in 9.2 for a while) and restarted.

The next time I booted into 9.2, I thought everything was fine as it came up normally and everything was where it should be. Copying a file from the desktop to the Macintosh HD icon (which is Drive B) moves the file, and doing the same to Macintosh HD (Old) icon (Drive A) turns it into copy instead of move. This makes me think that I'm running off the drive I want to be using, Drive B. But if I try to move a file on the desktop to a folder on the desktop, it copies instead of move, as if those folders are still on Drive A, the old one.

It's almost like I'm running the OS off of Drive B (the right one), but it's still pulling the desktop, programs, etc. off the old drive. I figure this is also the case because Dreamweaver and Quark both had to be re-pointed to the old drive to find their respective files.

So I think the problem is that I need OS 9.2 to read files and the desktop from the new drive, not the old one. Any idea why it's doing this?

(EDIT-) I apple-I'ed some files on my desktop and yep, they're still residing on the old drive. It looks like they're in a folder called Desktop Folder, but it doesn't seem to exist anywhere but on the desktop itself. Now I wonder if it really is booting up the 9.2 on the new drive or still from the old one... Why is it pulling the desktop from old one (as evidenced by apple-I on the files) yet booting from the new drive (otherwise Dreamweaver and Quark wouldn't be asking where their files ran off to)? I have the new drive at the end of the IDE cable and jumpered to master, and the old drive is in the middle of the IDE cable and jumpered to slave.

m19

Huh. I noticed that new files being made on the desktop were listed as being on the new drive, so I did a test... Copied a few aliases onto the drive and off the desktop, then copied them right back and voila, they're listed as being on the new drive now. Go figure.

So I guess, problem solved. Still not sure why it was splitting files across drives like that, but at least it's working correctly now.

m19

Interesting, these are neat things to find out before having a multi drive system... Something I have yet to try

you have two drives with OS installed on both of them. it means you have at least 2 desktop folders per user. when you boot from say, disk A, the desktop folder you see belongs to user from A. so when you try to put somethin from B to desktop, system is just copyes file from B to A. you can not just move file From A to B. this way you may end up having dublicates of files on each drive. I suggest to erase both disks (boot from OS X CD and use disk utility from it) and install panther on the smaller drive. this way you will have one disk with system files (both 9 and X) and the second one for data. with things arranged the way you have, you are just wasting the disk space.

MAC-simus said:

you have two drives with OS installed on both of them. it means you have at least 2 desktop folders per user. when you boot from say, disk A, the desktop folder you see belongs to user from A. so when you try to put somethin from B to desktop, system is just copyes file from B to A. you can not just move file From A to B. this way you may end up having dublicates of files on each drive. I suggest to erase both disks (boot from OS X CD and use disk utility from it) and install panther on the smaller drive. this way you will have one disk with system files (both 9 and X) and the second one for data. with things arranged the way you have, you are just wasting the disk space.

Click to expand...

Sorry, but you're wrong. I already said I have it fixed in my second post, and I disagree– I'm not wasting any space, and I'm the only user. The goal was to have OS 9.2, OS X, and all my files on the new drive, which they now are. The old drive is only there while I was transferring files over. I'm not booting from the old disk at all anymore (Disk A), so I think you missed the point. I'm booting from B, using files from B, and only running B, so A doesn't even come into play anymore now that everything's where it should be.

The problem wasn't having multiple drives– I've done that in several other Macs. I just hadn't copied over all the files I'd needed, so when I tested it by removing the old drive and booting up, it showed me which files it were still pulling from the old one since they then disappeared. Thus, I knew which ones to copy over still. Voila, problem solved.

m19

You might want to change the jumpers so that B, the new boot drive, is the Master drive; and A is the slave. Might prevent problems in the future.

Already did.

m19