How to change drive order

[Nitro1]

Not sure how to title or even explain this but i will hopefully make it clear.

I just upgraded my DVD drives and the new ones use SATA instead of the old connector. So now when i hit eject it ejects the bottom and then the option and eject does the bottom. How do i reverse that order? Also if i rip a cd from the top and hit the eject to close the bottom since it is reversed it says it can not open the drive due to in use. So something is clearly backwards.

Any help is great

Thank you

 

[flatfoot]

Either swap the drives or swap the SATA cables on the back of the drives.

Your Mac doesn't "know" wich drive is physically at the top. It just knows which port each drive is connected to.

Another way to go about this is to enable the eject menu, as described in this article.

 

[Nitro1]

Either swap the drives or swap the SATA cables on the back of the drives.

Your Mac doesn't "know" wich drive is physically at the top. It just knows which port each drive is connected to.

Another way to go about this is to enable the eject menu, as described in this article.

Sorry should have mentioned this. I swapped the SATA cables with no change.
Thanks for the link will look into it.

 

[flatfoot]

Sorry should have mentioned this. I swapped the SATA cables with no change.
Thanks for the link will look into it.

That's odd. It might be about which drive is recognized first at boot...

The following won't help in that case, but anyway, I would try this:

1. Disconnect the lower drive (power and SATA) and boot up.
2. Open the drive and insert any DVD.
3. Eject said DVD again.
4. Power down your Mac.
5. Add the second drive.
6. Boot up again.
7. Check whether the behaviour has changed.

Maybe your Mac will remember which drive was there "first".

 

[Nitro1]

That's odd. It might be about which drive is recognized first at boot...

The following won't help in that case, but anyway, I would try this:

1. Disconnect the lower drive (power and SATA) and boot up.
2. Open the drive and insert any DVD.
3. Eject said DVD again.
4. Power down your Mac.
5. Add the second drive.
6. Boot up again.
7. Check whether the behaviour has changed.

Maybe your Mac will remember which drive was there "first".

Your idea worked just fine. Thanks

Correction: It worked for a while then reverted back.

 

[ActionableMango]

What year Mac Pro do you have? I assume you have a 2008 or older with PATA instead of SATA cables in the optical bay.

Are you using some sort of IDE/PATA-to-SATA adapter? If so, the adapter might not be designed for two of them on the same bus and perhaps they are getting mixed up. For example, the adapter might simply report itself as device 0, in which case both adapters are claiming to be device 0. Or there may be a jumper setting or switch to change one of them to device 1 ("master" and "slave" in the original terminology).

There are SATA connectors on the motherboard. If you aren't using those, you should probably do so as it would probably fix the problem. If you are already using those, then I have no idea what's wrong.

 

[Ursadorable]

Back in the old days, IDE drives had Master/Slave jumpers on the drives to indicate to the OS which one was drive 0 and which is drive 1. That could be the case here. Check the jumpers on the back of the drive next to the IDE connector. Set the one you want to NOT eject as secondary.

Otherwise, this may be 'hardcoded' that IDE be the first regardless.

 

[Nitro1]

Your idea worked just fine. Thanks

What year Mac Pro do you have? I assume you have a 2008 or older with PATA instead of SATA cables in the optical bay.

Are you using some sort of IDE/PATA-to-SATA adapter? If so, the adapter might not be designed for two of them on the same bus and perhaps they are getting mixed up. For example, the adapter might simply report itself as device 0, in which case both adapters are claiming to be device 0. Or there may be a jumper setting or switch to change one of them to device 1 ("master" and "slave" in the original terminology).

There are SATA connectors on the motherboard. If you aren't using those, you should probably do so as it would probably fix the problem. If you are already using those, then I have no idea what's wrong.

I am used the Sata ports on the main board. I will look at the drive and see if it has a flip switch.

 

[ActionableMango]

I am used the Sata ports on the main board. I will look at the drive and see if it has a flip switch.

I'm reasonably sure that SATA drives don't have switches for device order, but I suppose it can't hurt to look.

 

[Nitro1]

I'm reasonably sure that SATA drives don't have switches for device order, but I suppose it can't hurt to look.

It is a 3.1 mac pro early 2008. I am using SATA drives and no they do not have switches on the back. Any other ideas?

Thanks

 

[AidenShaw]

It is a 3.1 mac pro early 2008. I am using SATA drives and no they do not have switches on the back. Any other ideas?

You are right, SATA doesn't have configurable switches - it's a one-to-one port topology. The boot process walks the IO chain, and configures the devices as it finds them.

It's possible that one of the optical drives (probably the "earlier" one) has inconsistent or variable initialization timings. Sometimes it's ready quickly, and shows up as the first optical. Other times, it might be slower and the second drive comes up earlier.

 

[Nitro1]

You are right, SATA doesn't have configurable switches - it's a one-to-one port topology. The boot process walks the IO chain, and configures the devices as it finds them.

It's possible that one of the optical drives (probably the "earlier" one) has inconsistent or variable initialization timings. Sometimes it's ready quickly, and shows up as the first optical. Other times, it might be slower and the second drive comes up earlier.

Well I have tried flipping the drives and changing the cables. It keeps going to the bottom one being first regardless of which drive it is. Almost like it knows it is doing it wrong. Wtf. The other issue and this is hard to explain. If I put a disc in the top drive which to eject is option+eject. I turn start ripping that disc and now I want to eject the other drive which is the bottom drive and is just the eject button. When I do that iTunes tells me it can not eject because it is in use. So confused.

 

[ActionableMango]

Did you ever install the eject menu? I'm curious what happens when you use that.

I have to use the eject menu anyway because I have a PC keyboard with no eject key.

 

[Nitro1]

I have always had the eject menu. That always works just fine. But I would like for the keyboard option to still work obviously.

 

[cerberusss]

It's possible that one of the optical drives (probably the "earlier" one) has inconsistent or variable initialization timings.

I remember that I used multiple serial-over-USB thingies on a Linux box. You'd never know which device number it would get assigned after boot or even after reconnecting. Sometimes, it'd be /dev/ttyUSB0, sometimes, it'd start at 2, 3 etc.

Thus I wrote little udev rules. These were files that you put in /etc/udev/rules.d directory. One-liners which basically said "if USB-device with such-and-such serial number was connected, then give it a human-readable alias such as /dev/ftdi_blue". And I'd actually put some blue tape on the physical USB device.

What topic starter wants, is a way to reliably link a certain device to a certain device name. I can't seem to find the equivalent of udev rules under OS X :-(

For RAID, this is definitely possible and documented, because obviously you want to tell the system which drives belong in which array.
[doublepost=1453796037][/doublepost]OK did a bit of searching.

This post on Stack Overflow shows how you can run a program when a certain USB device is connected:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7240117#12259762

Perhaps you can rewrite it such that it identifies your upper and lower DVD drives using information from the system_profiler command. Then the program to run should be a script that simply creates a symbolic link to the device in question. I.e. "ln -s /dev/disk3 /dev/dvd_top". However, I can't see a way to pass the device /dev/disk3 (or whatever) as an argument.