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Managing Disks - Certify, Verify, Initialize
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Topic starter
What can I do?
Posted : 27/08/2021 1:55 pm
Did you do this?
https://support.apple.com/en-lk/guide/mac-help/mchl768f7291/mac
Select reduced security and enable this:
Select the “Allow user management of kernel extensions from identified developers” checkbox to allow installation of software that uses legacy kernel extensions.
When you did the driver update, did you go to System Preferences / Security to "Allow" OWC as an identified developer?
If yes to both, then what if you paste this into the terminal.app:
sudo kmutil load -p /Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext
Posted : 27/08/2021 2:21 pm
Topic starter
Yes I have done all of that. Before I posted this thread. I also tried mounting in Terminal, but that didn't even successfully mount in readOnly, simply said it failed to mount at all.
When I reboot macOS, I get a warning that macOS was not able to repair the disk and that it is only able to mount read only, and thus the rebuild cannot commence. I have only had this enclosure for 6 months, purchased in March 2021, and it shipped with an i/o error in one of the disks already. I contacted OWC, but they then charged me for a replacement disk, so I waited to replace the i/o error disk until it failed. Now I am not even sure it is the disk's fault, softRAID never reported the disk failing, macOS just suddenly started to refuse to mount it properly. This mounting problem occurred after updating to 11.5.2.
Disk warrior does not support my OS or my M1 Mac, so this is really disappointing on a product that is only 6 months old. Are there any options for getting this RAID 5 volume whole again and back into parity?
Posted : 28/08/2021 1:22 am
Lets clarify things. An IO error does not mean a disk died. It means there was a communication error. It could be a disk, or a cable, or a faulty address in the volume directory for instance. You should not replace the disk unless it has other failure indications. OK? Clear the IO counters.
On the other hand, OWC would not charge you for replacing a disk that is new. Maybe shipping, yes. But it was a mistake to replace that disk, in my opinion.
If the directory is damaged, then you will get either a failure to mount or the mac OS saying "the disk is mounted read only"...
Once a directory is damaged it can get worse, until it does not mount. Unforatunately, macOS updates can make a bad volume directory worse, as may have happened in your case.
If you have your data backed up, I would erase the volume and copy the data back to it to remove all the issues. If you have no backups (you should) can you connect your disks to another computer to repair the volume with Disk Warrior?
Posted : 28/08/2021 2:19 am
Topic starter
Look, I get what you are saying. No the disk did not report a failure, a warning kept popping up from softRaid since the very first mount onto the system that the disk in question had an i/o error in the past, and strongly recommended replacing it, and this shows in the app as well. You are right, though, I didn’t need to replace it most likely.
However, I’d like to clarify if you are saying I should expect a RAID 5 volume to go bad every 6 months?
That seems off. I’ve had a LaCie Big5 Thunderbolt 2 RAID 5 for years on my Macs and have never had a volume corruption issue, and the hot swapping and rebuilding has gone off without a hitch when a drive went bad after 4 years or so.
Posted : 28/08/2021 8:46 am
No you should not expect a volume to go bad frequently. That was not the intent. I was explaining why volume directories go bad.
It got really bad as Apple switched to SSD startup disks. They shut down before other HDD drives could flush their ram cache) A "workaround" was put into macOS, to flush the cache on each drive at shutdown, you can see each light go on each bay on a enclosure one at a time at shutdown, on all your drives. It helps prevent HFS volume damage, but is not 100%. This happens to any volume, randomly, relatively rarely, but with millions of drives in the field, frequently.
This post was modified 2 years ago by SoftRAID Support
Posted : 28/08/2021 10:50 am
Topic starter
Summa Sumarium. In my situation, the simplest thing to do assuming I already have a backup of this volume, is to wipe it and just recreate a new RAID 5 volume, and do some copying back.
Posted : 30/08/2021 1:23 pm
