"Success! Leopard Installed Perfect to my FirmTek RAID 0 Setup
Success! Leopard Installed Perfect to my FirmTek Seritek 2SE2-2 RAID 0 Setup
Hi Mike, I think this might be an interesting tidbit for the latest in successful
Leopard installs, and indeed it was an install that I was dreading doing that worked out to be very simple, and easy.
As you might recall, I wrote a review of my system for you about a year ago. (See Seritek 2eEN4 Enclosure/2SE2-2 PCI-e Controller RAID Tests (G5 PCI Express System)) Which should take care of any questions about what I have, and use daily as my work station. It's still going strong, never had an issue with the whole setup yet, and I have upgraded the firmware in the 2SE2-E bus masters to v5.3.1 to be compatible with Leopard's quirks and requirements. (Note some readers initially reported problems with some cards and the 5.3.1 update when it was first posted here.)
Once that tedious procedure was finished, I said to myself, what the hey! Let's go for it, and try an Archive & Install of Leopard onto the RAID, right over the old install of 10.4.11 that I've been very pleased with. But there's nothing like a new OS, and certainly Leopard is very new in so many respects, so I inserted the installer disc into my DVR-110 and restarted my G5 2.3 Ghz Dual Core PowerMac with a few butterflies in my stomach but lo and behold, voila! There 1st up in the installer screen once booted into Leopard's DVD ROM was my RAID system, much to my surprise.
I customized the installation, getting rid of the Languages and all the printer drivers but Epson's, and hit the Install button after choosing Archive & Install as the method. Some 20 or 25 minutes later, I really lost track of time there for a few minutes...the installer was finished. The G5 restarted and it booted right up into 10.5, and I immediately hit Software Update and went for 10.5.1 as quickly as possible. After that was finished, I went for Disk Utility and Repaired Permissions, and got a slew of weird things I'd never seen before, SUID this and that, (Deja-Vu - for many reinstalling 10.5.1 via the download updater and/or repeatedly repairing permissions cleared most of the messages - although for some of us the ARDAgent warning still exists, but its not a cause of concern as mentioned here previously ad nauseum) but it didn't stop me from
seeing if everything was working right.
I tried my major Applications like Photoshop CS3 and Camera Raw 4.3, then Illustrator and Quark, and all the keys were fine, everything worked nominally. Ooops, Skype is dead though, so no love there...it just flat doesn't work under Leopard, which is a shame because I'm so used to using it for conferencing to Switzerland and the UK, where my partners are, so I guess it's back to iChat for awhile until the Skype folks get their act together. (Skype was broken originally but I asked if he had updated to the latest version-Mike)
Anyway, that's the story. No drama, and an easy install after all onto my 2TB RAID system, and so far, so good with everything except Time Machine in Leopard. I work with so many audio and video files that I have to turn off TM often otherwise it just keeps backing up huge video and audio files over and over again, and my backup drive (2TB Hitachi system in an OWC SATA Enclosure) would fill up to the max before I'd know it...so that's a drag. I may go back to a traditional backup system using SilverKeeper if it'll work in Leopard, and it seems it does, but right now I'm still hooked up with TM...just have to turn it off for much of the day or night, if I'm working on video or audio files.
There was some trepidation about losing my PL3507 external FireWire boxes, a couple HD's and my trusty DVR-110 external optical drive, but all the Prolific items are recognized without issues with 10.5.1. Maybe there were problems with 10.5 initially, but there's nothing bad happening with the external FireWire Prolific boxes in 10.5.1, I'm happy to report. Both my HD's and the DVR-110 are working perfectly, no issues at all at this time.
Another successful installation was with my Digital Audio PowerMac running the NewerTechnology DP 1.8Ghz 7448 G4 CPU system, by the way...not a bit of trouble with that installation. System profiler doesn't know quite WHAT to make of the CPU's, calling them "Power PC 60? (2.1)" CPU's, (that's common for 7447A upgrades also if no patch done for the ASP reporting. But at least with your integer ratio (bus/cpu multiplier) you didn't run into the misreported speed problem (causing the installer to think the system was too slow to meet requirements - a copy of previous tips/fixes for that are in the FAQ's CPU Upgrades and OS X sections.-Mike) and erroneously reporting that each CPU has 2MB of L3 Cache! Now that would make for a very nice CPU... But other than that, Leopard is running 100% perfect on that old box, which continues to perform nicely with the DP CPU's doing their thing.
Take care, and put out the word that successful Leopard installation over FirmTek SeriTek bus masters (bootable as they are) is a go! Kind of surprised me how easy it was to do, but then again, the FirmTek people always seem to have their act together when and where it comes to their firmware and the current OS, and they've again hit the mark with Leopard, straight and right on the money!
Kindest regards, David C."
(For those that had problems with the 5.3.1 updates with their card/system - don't flame me for that last sentence ;-)
