Carbon Copy Cloner
 

Has anyone else had any difficulties with Carbon Copy Cloner or ditto for that matter, on Jaguar? I've tried over and over again to clone my hard drive onto a firewire drive, but it keeps freezing. I'm on 10.2.2, with CCC 2.1, and a Que Fire 40 GB Firewire drive. I erase the drive each time with Disk Utility, each time giving it the OS 9 Drivers. Any help would be appreciated.

-ZeplinCorvex

Hello,

The only thing I can recommend is that you use psync (psyncX if you want a gui, google it, it's on sourceforge).

Reason is that psync is a perl solution (psyncx being a cocoa-perl solution) and CCC is an applescript studio solution using ditto.



v

Hmmmm
 

I downloaded Psync and tried it, but that froze up, too. I'm really beginning to think there might be some problem with my firewire drive. I've used Disk Utility to check it out, but it says that the disk in fine. Any ideas? Thanks

-ZeplinCorvex

does it freeze up during a finder drag copy? sounds like the drive or the cable. got another cable? got a hw test CD?

I'm trying Integrity 1.0.2 right now, but no errors so far. I have a few other cables that I'll try after the test, but the drive works fine in normal use (including drag copying and manipulating files via the finder), I'm thinking it may be the cache...is there a way to test this specifically? Thanks

-ZeplinCorvex

Stuck
 

I tried my other cables, and it didn't help. None of the utilities I used could find anything wrong, either. Finder drap and drop works fine, and I can install OS X on it with no problems, but once I try Psync or CCC, or even ditto, the write light on the hard drive freezes in the on position, Psync/CCC/Terminal will freeze, the Finder will freeze, and eventually everything else will freeze. Just the bouncy ball for ever. When I restart, nothing will be written on the Firewire. Using process viewer/top, I can see the both perl scripts and Psync will stop using CPU time when the drive freezes. Can anyone help? Thanks.

-ZeplinCorvex

What utilities have you run, and have you run them on your source disk (the one you are copying from)?



v

Utilites
 

All of the utilities I've run have been from the source disk. Right now the firewire drive is empty, there's no installation of OS X on it. So far I've run Disk Utility to Verify/Repair the disk, and I've run the tool that came with the disk, Intech Integrity. It ran through some cycles of hex (6 or 7) with no errors. My school has a site license for Norton Utilities, but it wouldn't get it for a while, and I fly home Saturday morning, so I thought I'd wait to get that. So far I can't find any problems with the disk, and I've never had any. The only problem comes when I try ditto/CCC/Psync. I can drag copy my entire app folder and works fine. Thanks.

-ZeplinCorvex

Hello,

Well what I'm thinking is that perhaps you have a bad file on your source disk, which is causing the failure when you choose to copy over everything.

Do you know the procedure to start in single user mode and repair the main disk? I think you could also use the OS X CD and run Disk Utility from there.

Did you manage to catch at what point it freezes? is it at the same place or file?



v

I had to fcsk the source disk a number of times (I had a corrupt plist file which wouldn't let me login to my normal account, unrelated) and even after that the backups wouldn't work. CCC always freezes when copying Applications, but at different apps each time. CCC copies some stuff, but always freezes. Ditto also freezes when it tries to copy Applications. Strangly, the finder can copy them onto the disk with no problem. Psync runs two perl scripts which I've tried to follow in the terminal, which use CPU time for some time then just stop using any time at all. At this point the finder will freeze if I try to a) force quit Psync or the terminal or b) relaunch the finder. After I've restarted the firewire disk will have nothing written on it. There doesn't seem to be any specific file that's messing it up, just trying to copy everything in general.
In every case, the write indicator light of the firewire disk "freezes" with the light on. Usually it blinks when writing.
Thanks for any help.

Try this: only copy over your /Users folder, if that works, chose another folder and so on; without copying the Applications folder.


v

I tried that, but no luck. I definitley think it's the firewire drive, and here's why: the program froze after trying to copy the bigger folders, namely Developer and Library, each was done seperatly. The funny thing was that I was able to quit CCC, but the firewire drive still had the light on indicating is was writing. Then when I tried to open a finder window, I got the beach ball. I'm guessing because it was trying to access the firewire drive and since it was frozen, finder kept trying with no luck, i.e. freezing. That's my best guess, but I still have no idea how to fix my drive. Could it be the cache? Any ideas? Thanks again for all the help.

-ZeplinCorvex

What was the FW drive formatted with? I had lots of trouble when I first bought my fw drives - I have 2 VSTSlimDrives. The problem turned out to be the formatting. Once I reformatted them with Mac (using OS X) they have worked flawlessly since then. I have only had one incident with them since then - for some reason - one time I backed up a bunch of MP3 files to the drive, next day I went to play some of those MP3's and they wouldn't play. Did some investigating and all teh MP3 files had zero length files size. Never could solve that and don't know what caused it either.

How exactly would I format the disk? I thought I was formatting it when I erased it with Disk Utility (I couldn't find anyother way, maybe I just wasn't looking well enough). Thanks for the help.

-ZeplinCorvex

I had a freeze problem with CCC once (to a Maxtor Firewire drive). I also thought it was a drive issue and did all kinds of repartitioning, reformatting, etc.

What finally worked for me was to login as root and CCC did a full backup, no problem.

Later on I installed a new upgrade of CCC and found that I could CCC as user...

Root No Good
 

I tried booting into root and trying it there....but no luck either. Top confirmed that ditto was getting to CPU time. I do have the latest version, also. Thanks.

-ZeplinCorvex

Yes - that is correct. If you used Disk Utility that is what I was talking about. As opposed to using a 3rd Party formatter like Intech Speedtools of FWDHardDiskToolkit. Those are the ones that gave me grief.

Hello,

How about you restart under 9 (you can use the CD) and use Drive Setup? Initialize your FW drive and choose to write zeros. If you get an error, you know it's the drive, if you don't... then we keep looking.



v

I tried booting into 9, but Drive Setup couldn't touch the firewire disk because it's "unsupported". I did run Disk Utility from Classic, though, and it found one error, which I then repaired with Disk Utility. Unfortunately, this had no effect when I booted back into 10.2.2 and tried to use CCC. It still froze up. I'm clueless. Thanks for the help.

-ZeplinCorvex

Do you happen to know what brand the actual drive mechanism is? My first VST had a Fujitsu in it that exhibited that behaviour when I was using OS X beta and OS 9 on regular basis. I attributed the troubles to that. I could work on it for a week or so, then one day I would plug it in and it would not mount. Couldn't do anything to it - no way to format it in OS X or OS 9. Strangely enough - if I pulled the drive from the FW case and installed it as IDE drive in an old Powerbook 1400 I could actually access the drive and even retrieve the data. After about the 3rd time of having to pull it and plop it into that 1400 (which is by no means easy!) I contacted Fujitsu via web form and they had a replacement drive to me in less than 3 weeks - I was very impressed. They even sent me a better/higher capacity drive. That drive has run flawlessly in that VST case for the last almost 2 years. Even been dropped several times.

My point being - some drives just come out fo the factory defective - they slip through the QC.