I have my music collection on a raid mirror in my G4, total size of about
half a terabyte. I noticed my system running really slow, so I finally 
decided to swap the system drive and reinstall OS X Tiger. When I started
the install on the new drive, I heard my mirrored music drives active,
so I started disk utility and got a message that the raid mirror was 
rebuilding, and that it would be about 2 hours. 45 minutes later, it 
still said it would be about 2 hours. A little bit after that, it said
"about 1 hour, 45 minutes". 

Well, I didn't really want to install OS X knowing that the RAID 
rebuilding was happening under the covers, so I went to sleep, and woke
up when it said "about a minute remaining". As I watched, it flipped 
from:

Estimated time left in rebuild: 1 minute

to:

Estimated time left in rebuild: 1193046 hours.



If my math is right, that's approximately 136 years. I let it chug along
for another hour, and when the dialog never changed, I powered the system
down, restarted the installation, and then when OS X was installed and
all the latest updates applied, I issued "diskutil checkraid" and kept
an eye on that. In about 3 hours, I had a healthy mirrored set again.

Kind of funny, these dialogs that try to be smart!

© 2007 Paul McNett       [/Computing] permanent link