[Sticky] How to upgrade a SoftRAID startup volume to High Sierra

this is a bummer man. this is a bummer.

Those are the two choices:
unmount volumes/disconnect before restarting
Disable "Enhanced Security".

So far Apple has said that they do not intend to fix this bug.

hi, I have a Mac Pro with 4 internal disks in a RAID 5 built with Softraid and I am now looking toward upgrading to High Sierra. After reading through this thread, I am left wondering what to do. If I boot from an external drive, would the High Sierra installer let me upgrade the internal RAID 5? If I understood correctly, I would have to disable Gatekeeper (what was called "High Security" in this thread). Or did I get it completely wrong?

The problem is the iMac Pro, not Mac Pro's. You must have a 4,1 or 5,1 Mac Pro.
The only problem is if you are starting up from the internal disks in RAID 5 mode.

High Sierra's installer does not allow that. We recommend you reconsider that arrangement and install an SSD in the lower DVD slot, and install High Sierra onto that. That will make things much easier going forward.

I am mirroring my start-up drive with SoftRAID. Instead of cloning to an external drive as described above, could I un-mirror the start-up, convert it from a SoftRAID volume to an Apple volume, upgrade it to High Sierra, and then re-mirror it with SoftRAID?

Apple no longer supports installing High Sierra onto any Apple RAID volume either.
We tested this with 10.14 beta to confirm this will remain the case.

You can:
Split Mirror
Convert to non RAID
Convert to Apple format
Install High Sierra
Boot from another high Sierra volume
Convert to SoftRAID
Convert to Mirror.

its easier probably to just install onto another disk. and clone back.

I followed the instructions above and booted to another volume, split the mirror of the (original) startup drive, converted to non-RAID and then Apple format, and finally installed High Sierra. Unfortunately, after then booting to another High Sierra volume, SoftRAID will not allow the (original, now High Sierra) startup drive to be converted to SoftRAID.

Any suggestions for how I now do so? I did notice that the High Sierra installer converted the drive to APFS. Is this the issue? If so, what do I need to do?

Thank you!

That is indeed the issue (APFS).

It is going to become very difficult to startup from RAID volumes.

What you need to do is use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the volume to a new SoftRAID volume, as HFS. Then you can convert to a Mirror, etc.
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Mohave is not going to allow a SoftRAID volume to be a startup volume most likely, so be prepared for that

FWIW, the thread at https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mojave-on-raid-a-howto.2125096/ details how to get Mojave booting from an AppleRAID; maybe the same technique will work with a SoftRAID volume too...

That is indeed the issue (APFS).

It is going to become very difficult to startup from RAID volumes.

What you need to do is use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the volume to a new SoftRAID volume, as HFS. Then you can convert to a Mirror, etc.
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Mohave is not going to allow a SoftRAID volume to be a startup volume most likely, so be prepared for that

Thanks for the pointer. While this will not work with SoftRAID volumes, it is interesting. I brought it to the attention of engineering.

Its possible Apple will prevent this trick in a future version of Mojave. We have been told explicitly that Apple does not want non standard volumes to be bootable for security reasons.

Maybe the market will tell them otherwise. This is probably being driven by security engineers, who are more concerned with hack/backdoor attempts than user experience.

Look at how you cannot even wake up a High Sierra machine with the keyboard any longer, you must use the mouse/trackpad and physically click it. Bet that was implemented by someone trying to prevent some type of remote event. But it is very annoying to users.

Maybe you could "have a little chat" with John Ternus, Apple's new "Pro Workflow Team" leader, and remind him that "Pro Users use RAIDs too!" I wonder if Dominic Giampaolo realizes the "pro user" will still be using HDDs for a long time.

"As Apple's Eric Tamura noted at WWDC, most Apple devices have a single storage device (i.e. one logical SSD) making RAID, for example, moot. Instead, redundancy comes from lower layers such as Apple RAID (apparently a thing), hardware RAID controllers, SANs, or even the "single" storage devices themselves." - A ZFS developer’s analysis of the good and bad in Apple’s new APFS file system by ADAM H. LEVENTHAL - 6/26/2016, 8:00 AM

Moot? Apparently a thing? Really? The developer of ZFS, which Apple almost licensed or bought off Sun before Larry Ellison stole it, instead of building APFS, didn't know about AppleRAID? What did he think was responsible those software RAIDs in Macs? I'm sure he was thinking about the ubiquity of SoftRAID in the macOS universe. But he had to have known one can build a RAID with Disk Utility. Maybe?

Anyway, as John Ternus recently said to Tech Crunch in regards to the upcoming Mac Pro..

"..And so they’re now sitting and building out workflows internally with real content and really looking for what are the bottlenecks. What are the pain points. How can we improve things. And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS, is it in the drivers, is it in the application, is it in the silicon, and then run it to ground to get it fixed.”

Why do I feel like that last sentence was meant to pacify an already stirred up bunch of long time dedicated Apple power users?

So if it's in the OS you'll fix it? Great! I've got two "fixes" for you Mr. Ternus.

1. Why not code a modern multithreaded AppleRAID driver or work with the SoftRaid folks? I plan on using RAID 0s and 1s for... most of my computing life. And I'd like to be able to set up my system to meet my needs. Not Mr. Cooks' needs.

2. Also, would you please build into the audio kernel, inner-application multi-channel audio into CoreAudio? With the "world's most advanced operating system", and considering one of your main core user bases is made up of musicians and you still sell Logic X, why do we still have to use apps like Sound Siphon (it's a nice app, btw), to move audio from one app to another? And why are we STILL relying on ReWire to provide a function that should have been built into CoreMIDI 20 years ago? This stuff is so obvious. Yet, Apple wouldn't hesitate yanking these types of features out if it served some unrelated purpose.

Frustrating!

Sorry for the rant.
Steve

Good rant. ;-)

We will keep trying to encourage Apple to support booting from RAID volumes.

This post will help users who startup from a SoftRAID volume to upgrade to High Sierra

Note: 10.13.2 also seems to be limited to Apple standard volumes, so even if you have High Sierra already installed, if the updater refuses to run, you may need to follow the below instructions.

Issues:
• High Sierra's installer will not directly install onto an Apple RAID volume
• High Sierra's installer will not directly install onto a SoftRAID volume
• High Sierra's installer can trigger a kernel panic on SoftRAID RAID 4/5 volumes

What about if I want to do a clean, "nuke and pave" install of High Sierra? Does this mean that I actually have to install a clean version of Sierra to my boot drive first, then continue with the steps you delineated to "upgrade" to High Sierra?

Is cloning still needed to upgrade a MacPro5,1 tot High Sierra? Even using SoftRaid Lite 5.7.2? Using a SoftRaid volume as startup disk.

Thanks,

Joost

Two part answer now:
You can install onto an Apple volume, and clone it. High Sierra will not install onto a SoftRAID volume. (Mojave will not install onto any RAID volume, even Apple's RAID as Apple is preventing non standard volumes from use as startup volumes)

However, with 10.13.6, even the Security upgrades do not install. So keep a clone on an Apple disk, then update the clone, then copy back. If your Startup and clone are SSD's this is not too long a process.