[Sticky] Important notes regarding Big Sur and SoftRAID

@jamesmathers

Follow along here, the directions will be very similar, this is for Mojave/Catalina.

https://srforums.wpengine.com/pages/support/5.8_Volumes_Not_Mounting.pdf

@softraid-support GODSPEED!

@softraid-support Well removing the secure boot issue is a game changer for me. That's great news.

I'm going to put an empty NVMe in my system and do a clean Big Sur install to that.  I'll then load the SoftRAID beta.  If my RAID5 is functional I'll redo the Big Sur update over my existing Catalina implementation.

@softraid-support

I just upgraded to Big Sur (should have checked before I did it), but I'm having the same problem.  I have a Thunderbay 4 in RAID 5 and it will not mount.  I have disabled the security on the T2 chip, given Softraid 6.0.1 b42 full disk access (however, I never saw the warning, "Other World Computing was blocked from loading,"  I did wait several minutes, but it never appeared.  

I've tried reinstalling the driver and restarting with nothing attached except the Thunderbay, and it still doesn't mount.  I can see it on the Softraid app, but it shows unmounted and when trying to mount, it just attempts and then stops without giving an error.  Just says unmounted. 

Any help would really be appreciated it.

@jmapalad

A handful of users are getting this. First look in the SoftRAID volume tile, and see if there is a "disk identifier" number, i.e disk6, rather than nothing (i.e just a -). This tells you it is a directory issue, as the volume was published to MacOS. (Disk Warrior is the fix)

If you have a -, then the driver is not loading.

A) did you download SoftRAID from this machine? (or did you copy it to it from another computer)

B) Is Secure Boot disabled (probably if you upgrade from 5.8.4)

C) If you open System Preferences/Security and unlock it, then run SoftRAID and click on the startup volume, and "Reinstall SoftRAID driver". Does that help? DO you see the Allow button activate?

@softraid-support

Thank you for the suggestions.  Here are the results of my trials . . 

I did check the SoftRAID tile and looked for the disk identifier number, under that area, I just have a -.

A)  I did download SoftRAID directly to this machine.

B) Secure Boot is disabled

C) I opened System Preferences/Security and unlocked it then rain SoftRAID and reinstalled the driver.  I received a message that the driver was reinstalled successfully, and now I had to restart.  The machine restarted.  I never saw the Allow button under system Preferences/Security.

I know that this must be a pain for you.  So I really do appreciate any help you can offer.  Thank you.

@jmapalad

Next idea is Disable SIP.

Disable SIP

Uninstall SoftRAID (utilities menu)

restart and install SoftRAID driver

Your volumes should mount driver load.

Reenable SIP

Hopefully the driver still loads.

@softraid-support

Thank you for this suggestions.  I followed all the commands, SIP did show disabled in the terminal.  I uninstalled the SoftRAID driver, it appeared to uninstall and the machine restarted.  When SoftRAID was launched, it stated a driver needed to be installed.  It installed successfully, I did select my disk labeled startup and reinstalled the driver.  The machine restarted, but no drive is on the desktop.  The Drive is visible via SoftRAID software and disk utility.  Still has a - as the disk identifier.

Do you have any other suggestions?

Thank you for all your help.

@jmapalad

This is very strange. Do you have any anti virus software running? If so, what if you disable that and run the SoftRAID reinstall driver again?

With SIP disabled, Mac OS has no protection against apps being installed (meaning users would need to be careful), but we of course are an identified developer and expect you to re-enable SIP once this is working. For the driver not to load is very mysterious.

@softraid-support

I have MalwareBytes installed.  I uninstalled that via the app and I also found and old version of TechTool Pro that may interfere.  I removed that via their uninstall tool.  Still no luck.

The other non-Apple software that I'm running is the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, Microsoft Office, 1Password, Zoom, Sonos, Plex, Dropbox, Box, LaunchBar, and Bartender. 

I did recently download DiskWarrior, but this problem was occurring before that was downloaded.

I do appreciate the help and all the time.

Posted by: @softraid-support

We had a forum user who discovered an obsolete extension, OpenVPN may have been blocking his SoftRAID driver from loading. Does not make sense, but possible.

Yea that was me (really my wife who figured it out).   

The clue was executing this comment as suggested by @softraid-support

sudo kextload -v 6 /Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext

The errors produced led to extensions tun.kext and tap.kext which were remnants from an old VPN installation I used to use for work.

FWIW this is a "trashcan" 2013 MacPro.

Removed the offending kexts and the driver loads and now successfully mounts the RAID array.

I suppose I should qualify messing with kexts can lead to problems.  My wife is a software engineer and was comfortable messing around with that stuff, and so far, there have been no noticeable problems from removing them.

There seems to be a small minority of users with this issue, but it is weird.

The one user that fixed this had his wife "delete obsolete extensions" that were in his system. Not sure how that had an impact.

When you first installed the beta, OSX put up a dialog box to allow OWC as a developer, with two options, "OK" and "System Preferences". Which did you do? Maybe there is some permanent variable if you do not allow it immediately, macOS permanently blocks the driver.

Disabling SIP and reinstalling the SoftRAID driver seems to be the only cure, and even then ,after enabling SIP again, the driver is blocked in some cases. try that and let me know.

How did she remove the kexts? With rm in terminal? or a simple finder delete?

The how did she reset the kextcache? (so they do not load) using terminal?

Trying to figure out. how to help other users. Thanks!

@softraid-support @thierrycoopman

Zapping the NVRAM/PRAM (or whatever they call it now) on my 5K iMac, seems to have solved the issue for me.  I had the same string of issues, the drives mount now.