macOS can't repair drive(s) on Thunder Bay mini

Sorry. This is a macOS issue/bug. When you upgrade MacOS, sometimes it does not properly unmount external volumes, and directories get damaged. It is not related to SoftRAID itself, it is something that is more frequent with larger volumes.

This has been an issue for 15 years+.

Your choice is backup/restore, or there is a commercial Application, Disk Warrior, that can easily rebuild the directory, so you do not need to go through the backup restore process. It costs money, but saves a lot of time. Disk Warrior is the only product that ever figured out how to rebuild MacOS directories, to optimize them, rebuild/repair them, etc. Its great. It does not yet support APFS, its HFS only still, however.

My recommendation on all MacOS upgrades, is unmount all external media first.

This same problem happened to me today. 😫 

After a MacOS upgrade?

(same recommendation)

@softraid-support -- Yes, I upgraded from 15.2 (where everything was fine) to 15.3.  After the upgrade, and before otherwise interacting with the external SoftRAID, I ran Disk Utility: first on the boot drive in Recovery, and second on the external SoftRAID (see grab of results).  Shortly thereafter I got other fail notifications and it became apparent the external SoftRAID was locked into some kind of read only mode.  See attachments.

@softraid-support Hi. - I ended up getting DW and it seems to have rebuilt the directory of the TB MINI and looks like I can write to it again.

But SoftRaid is now showing an error on one of the 4 drives - that data - disk failed.

I don't think the drive went bad - is there a way to reset/fix this soft raid error?

@bguiliano 

Yes clear the errors. IF the volume shows "failed", then use "recover failed disks" in volumes menu. I recommend validatingi the volume when prompted, which is a background task.

Disk Warrior is a great app. I hope it eventually supports APFS

@wbsmith 

Disk Warrior. It willi save you time, over backup / restore.

@softraid-support I purchased, downloaded, and installed Disk Warrior.  It spontaneously reboots the machine (16GB M1 MacMini) after about 5 minutes (due to CPU watchdog timeout / panic).  It has done this on repeated tries, including with different accounts and in safe mode.  Ugh.  I guess I'll install SoftRAID on a beefier machine (64GB MBP M1Max) here and see if Disk Warrior runs any better.  If that doesn't work, I guess I'll throw in the towel and recreate the RAID from backups.  I have SoftRAID v5.8 on an 128GB Mac Pro running Sierra -- but I'm assuming it would be asking for trouble to try to mount the contemporary RAID set on that older machine.

@wbsmith 

I would try a clean second system install. It will not affect your existing system.

Watchdog panics may be from disk hangs. First try running from a clean system. You can try from another computer, yes, HFS works the same on any macOS system from the modern era.

Run Disk Utility
Click on your startup internal
Click + volume
Name/save your volume
Shut down
Startup in recovery mode (hold the power button)
Select Options
Select "reinstall MacOS"
Point the installer to your new volume and install
Do NOT migrate data, etc. Use the same Admin name.
install SoftRAID. It will run. You can even activate on both systems.

You can delete it at any time, without affecting your existing startup volume. This is a "magic" feature of APFS.

@softraid-support

Well, DW fixed it (which is great), and thanks for your help, but it was an ordeal. 

I could not get DW to work on the 16GB Mac Mini M1, even though I followed your suggestion about running from a clean system.  (I also disconnected all non-essential accessories and tried safe mode as well.) It lasted perhaps a minute longer before crashing, and before it crashed DW displayed a new banner warning that the process would run slow due to low memory, but it still had the same kernel panic crash after only a few minutes. 

What did work was connecting the enclosure to a 96GB mid-2012 Mac Pro running High Sierra, installing SoftRAID 7.6, and installing and running DW.  The SoftRAID volume was very slow to mount.  DW took a long time (the RAID had 400k+ folders and 4.8M files) but rebuilt the directory without incident and no errors flagged by either DW or SoftRAID. 

The enclosure subsequently mounted back on the 16GB Mac Mini M1 as though nothing had ever gone wrong.  So I'm pleased that its fixed, but egads ... 2 days of my life stolen.  Thank god it happened on a slow work week. 

I'm quite skeptical that DW is functional on low end Apple Silicon running macOS 15.3 -- it my experience it is not.

Boy o boy going forward I will remember to disconnect external volumes before doing *any* macOS update.

@wbsmith 

If you dont mind, report those crashes to alsoft, so they can fix it. I have not had issues running on Apple Silicon, but will try testing on a base Air I have here.

@softraid-support 

I have submitted the kernel panic dump via their online form.  (I did get a web confirmation, but I haven't received any email acknowledgement.)

Separately, other than don't have media attached during macOS updates, what general maintenance / preventive maintenance advice do you have for SoftRAID volumes?  For example ... Is Disk Utility safe to use on SoftRAID volumes?  Is there anything about running First Aid in Disk Utility that I should not do?  Should I proactively rebuild the directory periodically using DiskWarrior? 

Thanks again.

@wbsmith 

You can run First Aid, but it is useless, IMO

Only Disk Warrior can rebuild an HFS directory.

I rebuild my volumes about monthly, depending on usage. When you launch it gives a health indicator, which helps.

Posted by: @softraid-support

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Sorry. This is a macOS issue/bug. When you upgrade MacOS, sometimes it does not properly unmount external volumes, and directories get damaged. It is not related to SoftRAID itself, it is something that is more frequent with larger volumes.

 This has been an issue for 15 years+.

This seems like a major macOS bug, has SoftRAID filed a bug with Apple about this?  Is it possible to get a link to the bug report?