I've got an iMac 2019 running Big Sur, with a ThunderBay with SoftRAID 6.0.3, with four 3TB drives. I have a "disk failure predicted" message and have been trying to replace this drive for the past several months with several beta versions and now SoftRAID 6.0.3. When I try to validate the RAID 5 array, it consistenly stops after 140 blocks are updated and crashes the Mac, causing it to restart. The drives are HFS+ (journaled). Any suggestions? Thanks
Attach a Support file, I think your disk may be bad enough it is hanging the system.
I would make sure my backup was as current as possible, then pull the disk out. (You may need to pull it to even get a complete backup.)
that disk is failing badly. It probably needs to come out just to back up your data.
Thanks for the quick replies. I did do a backup with CCC and it didn't give me any errors.
-- I'll backup again (to a different drive) once I pull the bad drive. Should I run validate on the RAID after I pull the drive and before backing it up?
I assume once I put the new drive in, I'll need to certify, initialize, and add the new disk back to RAID
Here are the different functions so you can be clear:
Certify: writes patterns and reads it back.
Verify: a simple read of the raw disk
Validate: reads the data in the volume to ensure it is readable. If all disks are available in a RAID or Mirror volume, it also updates parity data.
So there is no need to really do anything until you add the disk back and rebuild it. As long as the volume is mounting normally, all will be OK. Do not add a disk if the volume is not mountable.
Thanks!
Using your video "SoftRAID Replace Drive in RAID" I certified the disk, then initialized it with no problems. When I first attempted to add the disk, it gave me an error, so I restarted the computer and then was able to add the disk. However, unlike in the video, I got no info saying the RAID volume was rebuilding.
Is there something else I need to do to start the rebuilding process? I'm currently on the Free Trial.
Do I need to pay for the upgrade before the volume will rebuild?
Scratch that last request--a couple more reboots got the rebuilding process going again.
SoftRAID does require me to update the driver each time I reboot it though. Is this normal?
This tells me your extensions cache is not updating. When the rebuild is complete, attach a SoftRAID tech support file here, and I can take a look.
Lets try this:
Run the terminal.app. Paste these two commands in and restart.
sudo kmutil clear-staging
followed by:
sudo kextcache -i /
Restart
Then paste this command into terminal.app:
sudo kextstat -b com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID
Let me know if the output is 6.0.1.52 or 6.0.3.
6.0.3
I didn't start up SoftRAID after the restart
That worked, thanks!