9th
Installing Lion on a RAID volume
Installing OS X Lion automatically creates a new invisible recovery partition on the volume the target partition resides on. Unfortunately, if the target partition is a software RAID volume created by OS X’s Disk Utility (or probably any kind of RAID), the installer is unable to create this additional partition (or at least without destroying the software RAID) and might fail.
Reportedly, you can install on a software RAID if you can boot the computer which hosts the RAID from another volume either via the official installer or by cloning a Lion installation/partition (belonging to the same computer) from this separate volume onto the RAID volume. Unfortunately, for computers that ship with Lion, the App Store version of Lion does not install (they need a slightly different build). Thus, you need to first obtain a Lion installer for this particular Mac and ‘install’ it on the separate volume. Once that is done you can create the software RAID with it and either install with the previously obtained machine-specific installer or clone to the RAID.
Currently the only way to obtain this machine-specific installer is via Internet Recovery Mode (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718). You have two options to proceed:
—— A ——
- boot into Internet Recovery Mode
- start installation onto separate volume (this takes time because it first has to download the installer)
- boot from the installation on the separate volume
- create Soft-RAID
- clone the installation you are booted from onto the Soft-RAID
—— B ——
- boot into Internet Recovery Mode
- create Soft-RAID and try to install onto it (this takes time because it first has to download the installer) and will ultimately fail with an error message
- (while still being 'booted’ from the Internet Recovery Mode) restore the machine-specific InstallESD.dmg (that the installation attempt dropped somewhere onto the Soft-RAID) onto the separate volume,
- boot from there (ie, boot from the InstallESD.dmg which is the installer)
- install Lion onto Soft-RAID
For some reason, this will not install Disk Utility onto the Soft-RAID (probably because the actual Disk Utility binary usually sits on the recovery partition which does not exist on the RAID.
——–
Method (B) is taken from http://translate.google.ch/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.skgm.de%2F%3Fp%3D405, method (A) is a patchwork gleaned from multiple sources including comments from the previous link and I thus might have jumped to conclusions with it.
