N4N.US – Nerd 4 Nerd

Last weekend I noticed the Snow Leopard server’s cameras weren’t working. On digging (and restarting) I noticed the boot drive had failed. Ran permissions and disk repair, after a few errors and fixes, it passed all the tests. Sigh of relief!

Then on Tuesday, same thing. Only this time the drive would not respond to any commands or disk utility tools.

Ordered two new 750 gb hard drives from MacSales.com, installed. Spent hours trying to recover and back up the bad drive. – Started a format, cancelled, then once again tried disk utilities, it help. – Target mode the old drive, carbon copied the old drive on to the new drive. – Booted on a USB Snow Leopard installer, ran disk utilities and rebooted.

It worked!

Only issue I had was Open Directory didn’t work, so demoted server to standalone, then back to master, then did a restore from backup. It worked

Trying to upgrade student stations from 10.5.8 to 10.6.8 using DeployStudio. Holding down the ‘n’ key is hit and miss, out of 8 computers 3 wouldn’t see server. Unblinded, deleted files in the directory folder in preferences. Remove computer from AD and OD. Still nothing.

After a little head scratching, I moved the computer to DHCP. Bing! Everything now works as expected.