[X4U] Xserve drive and drive bay switching

[Jesse Leo]

Hi all,

Crazy situation/question about hard drives in a G4 DP Xserve. Briefly here
is the history:

1) We had two drives in the Xserve. The OS volume was flaking out so we put
the OS on the second volume, made it the startup volume, and rebooted.

2) We then dismounted the original (flakey) OS volume and pulled the drive
sled out of the bay. Server ran perfectly for about a month after this.

3) Had to reboot today. After coming back up the server is acting extremely
sluggish and is having having some serious delay and retries. Finder appears
to keep having to restart itself. At the 'Login Window Starting' point it
hung for over 4 minutes. Luckily it still seems to be serving pages alright,
even in this struggling state.

Question is -- is there something about that other (bad) drive that requires
it be to inserted after a reboot (master, slave, bay 1, bay 2... Etc). Is
the OS "looking for" this other drive as it boots up? Does it even matter
what bay the OS volume is in? We're really scratching our heads on this one,
any suggestions would be great.


Thanks!
Jesse