On the Mac Pro (Early 2008): The BIOS emulation that Bootcamp uses with windows when you dual-boot has an interesting error: If you attempt to boot using a device plugged into the unused SATA connectors marked “ODD_SATA”, it fails. Since Apple never shipped a Early 2008 Mac Pro with SATA optical devices, they never bothered to write the BIOS emulation to support them. Oops.
So I’ve been doing some thinking on why the mac has problems with expanded volumes. By expanded volumes, i mean a volume that gets bigger after initial creation. This isn’t an issue for physical disks, since their size is set. But virtual volumes, such as those presented by a RAID card can be “grown” through raid magical goodness.Once they’ve been grown - someone/something needs to update the GPT headers to say “this disk is much larger than before”. Part 1 accomplishes that through destroying the GPT headers, and re-creating them. It works, but man is it nerve-wracking.The other way one could do this, is by directly editing the GPT headers.In the GPT headers there are some fields:
FirstUsableLBA
The first usable logical block that may be used by a partition described by a GUID Partition Entry.
LastUsableLBA
The last usable logical block that may be used by a partition described by a GUID Partition Entry.
AlternateLBA
LBA address of the alternate GUID Partition Table Header.
HeaderCRC32
CRC32 checksum for the GUID Partition Table Header structure. This value is computed by setting this field to 0, and computing the 32-bit CRC for HeaderSize bytes.
What has to get updated is that LastUsableLBA and AlternateLBA. AlternateLBA should be = the last block on the hard drive.LastUsableLBA should be something like AlternateLBA-32.Once you’ve updated these, you have to calculate a new CRC32 checksum.If you’re a good person, you would go ahead and write the alternate header to the end of the disk - a bad person would just let the OS panic about the lack of backup headers and fix it itself.I’ll be doing some testing of this over the coming weeks, and i’ll let you know what i find.
Why is there never enough storage available? The 13TB array keeps on getting full - so time to build Array2. I should name my arrays - got suggestions?Anyways, I want Array2 to be a little less hacked together than Array1. So, my choices for enclosure include:
These are nice enclosures, but you also need a power supply($100ish), power supply controller, and a sas expander ($250). So you’re really looking at $750 ish.Supermicro (who makes the drive bays in Array1), makes some nice enclosures.
Yes, the supermicro cases are spendy. But - they include the power supply and sas expander. And they’re great quality.My only bitch is with the depth of the cases. I don’t need space to put a motherboard in the case, so something 25″ deep is just…. overkill.PS: With any case that doesn’t have a motherboard in it, you can use the Supermicro CSE-PTJBOD-CB1 to control the power supply. It’s $25 well spent.
IMPORTANT NOTE:The following procedures are ONLY for people with RAID cards who have upsized their raid array. If you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, this is not for you! If you want to move from a smaller single drive to a larger single drive, try CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper .Once my raid array had finished upsizing from 5.5GB to 9.1GB, I had to resize the partition in order to actually use the space. OS X’s Disk Utility gives the oh so friendly error 
(Partition failed with the error: MediaKit reports partition (map) too small. ) Not particularly helpful, is it. All my googling has never found an answer, so I thought I’d post my solution here.
Basically what’s going on here is that the GPT table is built only big enough for the drive it’s on. That’s a logical assumption - hard drives don’t magically get larger - unless they’re RAID arrays. We’re just removing the GPT partition information, and replacing it. Should things go crazy, as long as you’ve got the start and size information for the partition you care about, you should be good. No guarantees obviously, but I’ve done this three times and no data loss yet.
Finally replaced the horrible old sink in my bathroom. One of these days I’ll remember to take a “before” picture as well. The new sink is a good 5 inches wider, but not as deep, so the bathroom actually feels bigger with it.
Only bad thing was my old faucet (A Price-Pfister Portland) doesn’t fit. side note: Price-Pfister makes nice faucets. Their web site designer/maintainer should be shot. Their “product finder” doesn’t.
Searching for cheap sas cables….
1M SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 cable
.5M SFF-8087(host) to 4 SATA(device)
SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 Adapter
All pricing is as of 3/21/2009
Update! PC-Pitstop will match the $15 SAS breakout cable price if you ask.
There once was a bad tree.It had to go. So I played arborist with a chainsaw, and there was nothing but a stump left.
anyways - that stump was there for ages. It had chain link fence in it, so i couldn’t just use the chainsaw on it. 
(seen here in a pic from 2007)Fast forward a couple years. I got the great idea to move the back fence in a bit, and carve out a place for the trash cans to sit where they would be on my property, but accessible to the trash men. How do you remove a stump? Kerosene. Charcoal briquettes, and scrap wood to burn as a fuel source. 
After a couple weeks of lighting everything on fire every night - the stump was gone. So I poured the concrete, laid the brick pavers on top - and voila! 
The classiest trash can pad in the neighborhood.
