[Sticky] SoftRAID driver not loading at startup in Big Sur - workaround in SoftRAID 6.1 beta

@softraid-support exactly, there is no need for a preference but probably best to only do it for unmounted drives. the sleep reordering is a critical issue that really needs a fix duct tape or not. It’s corrupted so many vms for me. Very painful 

@dfortney

Is the sleep /disk renumbering causing data corruption in your VM's?

Is that from them shutting down incorrectly?

if they are on SoftRAID volumes, the driver locks the volume as soon as this state is detected after waking, so there can be no IO to the disks. Maybe it is because they are in an "inconsistent state" as they are not shut down, and locking the volume, causes them to be inconsistent at shutdown?

Maybe this is a way we can get some movement on this. thanks

@softraid-support correct, i believe whatever data had not or needs to be written to the vm files gets purged somehow due to the lock and it has a high possibility of the vm no longer working.  sometimes parallels is able to recover and sometimes not. whenever i would return to my sleeping computer and wake it and see the string of softraid error dialogs i knew i had accidentally left the vm running before leaving and there was a 50% chance i would have to start all over.  it was a hard lesson to learn to eventually move all my vms off the external raid to not lose all my work.  since then there were no longer any vm corruption issues accessing them from internal storage.  i have since retired and no longer use parallels or vms much but yeah this was a serious major issue that really hurt.

@dfortney

Understand. I guess the only practical solution at this point is unmount volumes before sleep.

We discussed this in an engineering meeting again and the main problem with trying to work around this is introducing bugs or data corruption, where we cannot tell where it is coming from, particularly macOS or our driver. At least now, we have put a halt to data corruption caused by this issue.

(imagine if the SoftRAID driver wrote out data to the wrong disks, that is the real problem with this issue, and why we had to put in such an extreme measure)

When I was running BigSur 11.5.2 the softraid kext and ZFS kext did not load on startup and had to manually loaded with terminal commands.  I just updated to Big Sur 11.6.  Both kexts are now loading normally at startup.  

@calbear88

Thank you very much for the feedback. Maybe it was indeed fixed in 11.6!

@softraid-support

Hi please for help I have a mac os Big Sur 11.6. My disk array is not loading.

@mirek

This is not a driver issue, it is a volume directory problem. It appears to me some process erased the volume header.

How did this happen? When was the last time your volume mounted?

Do you have access to Disk Warrior (and a computer with Catalina or older on it?)

@softraid-support

today I did a clean install. the disc does not appear for about 2 days. also tested on a macbook that has OS Catalina. it doesn't work either.

@mirek

Is the data backed up?

@softraid-support

do you mean data on OWC disk? I sent the pictures to an email.

@mirek

Sorry, I mean is the data backed up elsewhere? This may be difficult to repair the volume, it may need data recovery. There is no information at all in the volume header. (which tells macOS where the volume starts and where the directory is located)

I have just upgraded to Big Sur 11.6 and SoftRAID 6.1 and my Thunderbay 4 will consistently not mount unless I run the suggested terminal command every time after booting. I do already have the "Manually load SoftRAID driver on restart (Mac OS 11 only)" option checked but this doesn't seem to help. I also tried running the beta version 6.2b1 but I still get the same results. Please help. Thanks.

The problem arised for the first time today here (using Big Sur 11.6 and SoftRAID 6.1). Loading the driver manually allowed the disks to mount. I then checked "Manually load SoftRAID driver on restart (Mac OS 11 only)" and rebooted several times to make sure everything was fine : so far so good but I'm surprised that it happened for the first time after upgrading to SoftRAID 6.1. Looks like a very tricky problem.

@micheloupatrick

You are correct, it is a tricky problem. It depends in part on what other extensions are ready to be loaded. I am hoping the current Monterey beta fixed this, I am not sure yet, but it may have.