The bless tool was unable to set the current boot disk

[Benjamin Phillips]

Hello,

I have just spent the last 24 hours cloning 2.97TB of data from my current boot drive to my new boot drive. I now go to boot the drive, and it tells me:
"You can't change the startup disk to the selected disk. The bless tool was unable to set the current boot disk."

I have tried booting at start up by pressing the option key however the drive is not presented as an option at this point.

My new hard drives which I have cloned my data to are stored in an icybox enclosure - model number:ICY-RD3640
The enclosure contains 4 x WD Red 4TB drives in a raid 0 configuration. Raid was set using disk utility.

The disks are connected to the mac using Firewire800.

I have tried to boot both of my macs from the clone. My macs are as follows:
iMac, Late 2009 21.5" - running OS X 10.7.2 - This is the mac I want to boot from
MacBook Pro, Mid 2012 13" - running OS X 10.9.5

Any assistance with resolving this issue would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Benjamin.

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

Hi Benjamin

Which program did you use to do the cloning?

Regards

Sam

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MacAmbulance

Sam Mullen

07747778022

in...@macambulance.co.uk

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[Benjamin Phillips]

Hi Sam,

Thanks for your help with this issue.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the hard drive.

Regards,

Benjamin

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

Hi Benjamin

Have you tried SuperDuper? Perhaps another cloning program might take a different tack? Also have you tried installing OS X on a single disk via the IcyBox enclosure and booting from it? There might be a chipset conflict which is prevent it from being selected as a boot device.

Regards

Sam

MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development Sam Mullen ACMT +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.co.uk www.macambulance.co.uk MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

[Benjamin Phillips]

Hi Sam,

I have not tried SuperDuper but this could be worth a try. I am trying to avoid having to start the transfer all over again just due to the amount of time it takes.

Installing the OS onto one drive via the enclosure could be a good idea from a test point of view. Please can you explain in more detail about the chipset conflict and what this means.

Many thanks,

Benjamin

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[Sam - MacAmbulance]

Hi Benjamin

If you boot holding down ALT on the keyboard you’ll see a list of all the boot drives available to the Mac. If the Mac scans the firewire port and sees the IcyBox enclosure it’ll ask it for any drives connected. If for some reason the IcyBox enclosure’s controller chip doesn’t respond in the correct way or doesn’t understand the boot requests, then the Mac won’t find the RAID0 (or any other boot volume) to boot from. 

The Western Digital Studio Passport was a mobile FireWire800 drive marketed for use with Macs, the only problem was that it wasn’t bootable due to the chipset and firmware on the drive controller card, making it entirely useless for me.

It’s unlikely given the generic, adaptable nature of the IcyBox enclosure that it wouldn’t support booting, but installing OS X on a single drive connected to the IcyBox then booting from it will test the ‘bootability’ (if that’s a word) of the enclosure. 

If you are able to boot the RAID, the fact that it’s a software RAID will slow things down, also that it’s on the FireWire800 bus will greatly hamper the speed of the drives, you might find the system to be very slow and show the spinning beachball much more than normal.

Don’t suppose your Mac’s got a thunderbolt port? If it’s the 27” 2011 iMac then you can also fit an additional internal SSD drive to boot from, then store your data on the mirrored RAID, will be like a new Mac.

Regards

Sam

MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development Sam Mullen ACMT +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.co.uk www.macambulance.co.uk MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

[Jason Davies]

On 28 Sep 2014, at 9:22, Benjamin Phillips wrote:

> have not tried SuperDuper but this could be worth a try. I am trying
> to avoid having to start the transfer all over again just due to the
> amount of time it takes.

if you buy Superduper you can select incremental back-up -- it won't try
to restore things that are already there. If you use it free, it will
erase and re-copy.

[Benjamin Phillips]

Thank you Jason for your contribution.

I have looked online and managed to find a manual for my enclosure. As you mentioned Sam there is a chipset in the enclosure and I believe this could be the issue. Following the manual I have gone through and configured the drives to raid 0 using the enclosure. Unfortunately this removed all the data from the drive.

I am know transferring all the data back onto the drive using disk utility. Hopefully it will then read it as a boot drive. I will let you know the results tomorrow when it should hopefully have finished transferring all the data.

Thank you once again for your help.

Best regards,

Benjamin Phillips

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[Sam - MacAmbulance]

Oh dear, what a pain! Still at least a hardware RAID will be faster than a software one.

Regards

Sam

MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development Sam Mullen ACMT +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.co.uk www.macambulance.co.uk MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

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[Jason Davies]

On 28 Sep 2014, at 16:09, Benjamin Phillips wrote:

> I am know transferring all the data back onto the drive using disk
> utility. Hopefully it will then read it as a boot drive. I will let
> you know the results tomorrow when it should hopefully have finished
> transferring all the data.

can you just install a basic version of the OS to see if it boots from
that?

[Benjamin Phillips]

Hi Jason,

I could do this yes. I will let the computer run in the hope it will be successful now the enclosure is handling the raid configuration. Should it not be successful I will then go through and install a copy of OS X directly on the drive.