Sonoma Issues

Posted by: @softraid-support

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@mcc716 

Please also attach a SoftRAID Technical Support file (from this current system), so we can look for oddities.

I will try creating a second volume this weekend

Support file is attached. 

Thanks!

RAID 5 Volume setup in SoftRAID Beta (for Sonoma) will not mount in SoftRAID XT 7.6 (non beta)

No errors, no option to rebuild the array and nothing in the log file. It simply tries to mount the volume multiple times (about 10 minutes of trying) and then stops leaving it unmounted.  This is absolutely bizarre.

@thatprivacyguy 

This is a directory issue. I hate ExFat as moving it from Windows to mac can result in easy degradation of the directory. We just removed direct support for this in SoftRAID Mac for this reason. One of the reasons is ExFat has no backup directory, so is more susceptible to directory damage than HFS or NTFS. (or so I am told by engineering)

You need to erase and restore from backup, or run a recovery application like R-Studio, EaseUS or perhaps Disk Drill. All three should have a trial mode to try with.

there are no "repair" utilities that I know of that run in MacOS for ExFat file systems. there may be in windows, I do not know.

@softraid-support I didn't move anything from Windows - I created the volume in SoftRAID and formatted it using exFAT since it will be storing files from Windows which need to be accessed from multiple different OS (Apple TV, iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD) and as far as I am aware exFAT is the most compatible FS for this purpose (if it isn't please advise on a different FS to use).  Nothing has been added or changed on that Volume for several weeks and it was still working perfectly fine until I installed the update for SoftRAID today - it was only after I restarted my Mac that it would not mount.

@thatprivacyguy 

Sorry this happened. It is likely a update issue from MacOS not flushing the cache on the volume correctly at shutdown/restart after the install. As a result, the directory gets corrupted, apparently. At least the same mechanism happens to HFS.

Every MacOS upgrade, there are users who complain their external volumes no longer mount. MacOS runs an auto repair on all volumes in HFS or APFS format on restarting, which probably fixes most directory issues at mount time. But when it fails, the volumes are left unmountable or read only.

Because of the amount of users I encounter, I see these a fair amount. I also see APFS volumes that can no longer mount, always "external" volumes. I also see the oddity of connecting those volumes to a different system, enables them to mount (possible they can clear some flag that is preventing the volume from unwinding to the last mountable state)

SoftRAID does not ever initiate writes of data. When MacOS wants to write to a disk, the SoftRAID driver passes the read/write requests to "disktool", which performs the actual reads and writes to the disks. It was designed this way to avoid any potential driver compatibility issues.

So while I do not know what happened to your volume, my guess it is a side effect of the MacOS upgrade. Back around 10.3 or 10.4, when MacOS had the disaster of damaging many thousands of users external drives, I never upgrade MacOS with any externals attached. Just cautionary, but I recommend all users to do this.