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New Mac Pro, macOS Catalina 10.15.2 & RAID 5 out-of-sync issues...

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(@bostonarea_mac)
Posts: 2
Member
Topic starter
 

Hello.

I’m new to this forum, new to SoftRAID and mostly novice regarding RAID setups in general.

Let me give a rundown for you:

⁃ New Mac Pro 2019
⁃ New OWC Thunderbay 6 enclosure
⁃ Installed (x6) 2TB drives (used) into Tb6 enclosure (12 TB total)
⁃ Setup Tb6 as a RAID-5 volume
⁃ Noted that two of the 6 drives showed as “disk failure predicted” but had no alternate drives at the moment to swap.
⁃ Migrated 4TB of data from OLD Drobo to Tb6 successfully
⁃ After successful migration, ran a full-backup using a new Thunderbolt 3 Drobo 8D drive (mirrored)
⁃ Upon confirmation that all the data was accessible on OWC Tb6 drive *AND* successful TimeMachine (mirrored) backup to the Drobo, I decided to investigate the drives.
⁃ I decided to swap-out the worst of the two to let it rebuild before swapping-out the second “bad” drive.
⁃ Removed old disk from Bay “E” of the Tb6.
⁃ Swapped-in a different 3TB drive, Initialized it within SoftRAID, then “Added” it to the RAID-5 volume successfully.
⁃ Upon adding the Bay “E” drive back into the volume, the parent volume indicated it still needed “Rebuilding”, and the child-disk in Bay “E” claimed it was “out of sync”.
⁃ I attempted to “Rebuild” the parent volume via the contextual menu and/or the top menu bar - but - each time, *nothing* happened in the UI - Except occasionally, the system would ask me to authenticate the action, but STILL nothing happened AFTER authenticating.
⁃ I came to these forums and read a bunch of posts/threads.
⁃ Volume is Read/Write… I set Optimization to “Workstation”… tried dozens of times to no avail. Nothing happened.
⁃ I then went to the next option others mentioned: Purchase/Download/Install/Use the DiskWarrior application.
⁃ I Bought / installed and ran the app and performed a “Rebuild” on the parent Volume of the RAID. It successfully rebuilt it with only 3 or 4 changes made to the data.
⁃ Closed DiskWarrior and relaunched SoftRAID… no change to the status of anything. Parent volume still “needs rebuilding” and the child disk in Bay “E” was still “out of sync”… and the disk in Bay “F” still needed to be swapped at some point - but NOT YET until I know the disk in Bay “E” is functioning AND the volume is healthy.
⁃ Next, I found a thread here with Terminal commands to change/set something within the files to get them out of “quarantine” in macOS Catalina 10.15.2
⁃ I followed every step and did the final terminal command that confirmed (I forget the actual command & result)
⁃ rebooted… re-ran things… nothing has changed.
⁃ Like others, I have been confused WHY the status never changes to “Rebuilding” in SoftRAID.

I would like to get my volume “Rebuilt” and healthy - AND the disk in Bay “E” - in the proper state before attempting to swap the OTHER disk in Bay “F” that also shows “disk failure predicted”.

Can someone PLEASE assist in getting SoftRAID to successfully “Rebuild” the volume…?

Am I missing something…? Did I overlook a step…?

Thanks in advance for ANY help - especially since I am asking just-before Christmas. :)

Scott

 
Posted : 24/12/2019 9:28 am
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8008
Member Admin
 

Sorry you had all these issues, but I suspect the problem is actually a simple one.

Restart and run SoftRAID. If it asks to update the driver, then you did not disable secure boot. So the 5.6.8 driver loaded, instead of 5.8.1's driver.

Here are instructions:
https://www.softraid.com/pages/support/faq/faq_imacpro_secureboot.html

I know this is buried in the release notes, but we had to get 5.8.1 out very fast. The problem is Apple added additional features to Catalina after the final beta, and one of them required Secure Boot to be disabled. Otherwise, only the limited driver that is included with MacOS is loaded at startup. this driver cannot rebuild.
(We never anticipated this kind of problem, so SoftRAID's application does not detect this condition to report to the user)

Once you disable Secure Boot, then SoftRAID will be fully functional.

We are still working on a permanent solution to this, and hope it can come from the Apple end.

When you have two drives that are predicted to fail, do they have reallocated sectors? Just checking you actually have failed disks, rather than IO errors, which can be from other problems, for instance.

Note: this is a 100% moderated forum because of spammers, and it is non functional if we did not prevent abuse. that is why your multiple posts did not just "appear" automatically.

 
Posted : 24/12/2019 10:38 am
(@bostonarea_mac)
Posts: 2
Member
Topic starter
 

AAAAaaahhh... now I understand why my posts were "vaporizing.

I just followed your link to the instructions and did as suggested, and now immediately upon reboot, SoftRAID just jumped-in and started rebuilding without any prompt.

VERY nice. Thank you for your assistance.

I presume that once it's done "fixing" things, it'll be safe for me to swap the drive in Bay "F" as well and have it rebuild. ( ? )

 
Posted : 24/12/2019 10:50 am
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8008
Member Admin
 

We were once getting hundreds of fake entries a day.

Glad you are working and yes you do the same steps.

 
Posted : 24/12/2019 4:35 pm
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