Upgrade to macOs 11.5 and RAID are now showing as unmounted

Most likely you are encountering a Big Sur bug that does not auto load drivers. Run the terminal.app and paste this command in, and see if your volumes mount:

sudo kmutil load -p /Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext

Note:
The "up" key in terminal will show prior commands, so next time you need to manually load SoftRAID, just hit the up arrow in the terminal window, and this command will be available without having to type it.

@softraid-support  After rebooting a couple times it is now mounting... not sure what is going on but it seems ok now.  Is there any way you can have SoftRaid automatically execute that shell command on launch if raid drives are unmounted?

@dfortney

Technically yes we could, but our chief engineer abhors adding "short term" code, as it leads to bloat. And, Apple has informed us this will be fixed, so we would not want to write code for short term, that we then have to pull out, or special case for specific operating systems/conditions etc. remember the up arrow in terminal. It is not immediate, but if terminal auto launches at startup, the command executes pretty quickly to mount your volumes.

@softraid-support yeah, I am a sw dev who feels the same about these sort of work around 'hacks' but to be honest they often solve a ton of user issues in the meantime and are very easy to remove ultimately if Apple ever actually does get around to really fixing the bug which always takes 10 times longer then anyone would anticipate.  Personally I think adding a clear ifdef clause in the code to pre-compile disable it later is the right approach and by commenting it appropriately you can follow the history of this bug in source control or re-enable it the next time they break something. ultimately it is far better then letting Apple's bug show through as a SoftRaid bug to the end user who doesn't want to be disconcerted or frustrated by these type of issues.

@dfortney

I tend to agree with you. I think the main reason for not doing it at present is the commitment to fixing it we received. Lets see what happens.

I found there were strangenesses with 11.5.1, but 11.5.2 totally broke everything (driver didn't load; could be installed by softraid app; but didn't survive reboot.) Plus its means of approving kexts seems to be different ('just tick all the ones you're happy with')

A complete weekend lost.

I **think** I've 'fixed' the situation by using a lucky-I-had-it-around MacOS 11.4 install .app on a clean empty SSD, and copying some stuff over.

This will tide me over until the promised Apple fix is received.....

But it is, to say the least, a major annoyance.

@petewilson

Did you know about the command line (terminal.app) to manually load the driver?

sudo kmutil load -p /Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext

Note:
The "up" key in terminal will show prior commands, so next time you need to manually load SoftRAID, just hit the up arrow in the terminal window, and this command will be available without having to type it.

The forum is monitored over the weekend, btw, if you run into issues.

@softraid-support

Thank'ee, yes, I did.

But I'm a scaredy cat. The situation *seems* to me to be unstable [ie, it feels like Bad Things happen], so I shall avoid it 11.5.2 for the moment.

11.4 seems completely stable. I'm sure that 11.5.X will turn up one day and fix everything...

-------

Incidentally, you'll see some 'OWC Support' requests from me from over the weekend o this subject. I think you can dismiss 'em quick since I seem simply to have discovered what was already known.

@petewilson

If I see them, I will close them, else tell your rep to close them.

When you used the command line, was there an error in the terminal? I am wondering what happened.

@softraid-support

I didn't use the command line. I'd had one drive in a 3-drive RAID 5 be observed to 'die' overnight, and that triggered fixing stuff. Then, foolishly, I downloaded 11.5.2 which resulted in Badness. Confounded by seeking to use DiskWarrior 5.2 on the sick disk. Initially I suspected that DW was the culprit (the RAID is, of course, HFS+ so I can repair it..). Took a while with various boot disks to narrow down what was happening. Had I simply re-initialised the sick disk and let SoftRaid rebuild; then used DW on the result, I'd probably have been better off. But the disk structures were pretty broken, so... 

Lessons for the future.

All as clear as crystal now