Resolved Dual boot CONFIRMED for new Apricorn Velocity DUO X2!!!

[hfg]

What OS version are your running?
Cheers

I am running the latest OS versions: High Sierra 10.13.2 from one SSD, Windows 10 from the other SSD

MacPro (Mid 2012) 5.1 12-core 3.33GHz


note: I am not running this card in RAID 0 ... software or hardware RAID. Some of the comments are raid related, so my setup may not apply to the OP issues if running RAID.

 

[h9826790]

Yes, Sonnet Tempo Pro Dual SSD. High Sierra will not even begin to install issuing an error message about support not available for APPLERaid. This is confirmed by Apple and Sonnet. Sonnet compatibility chart for the Dual SSD RAID 0 says card is supported, but not for booting. Sierra issues a warning that recovery partition is not built when upgrading from El Capitan.
[doublepost=1515712754][/doublepost]

Are you booting off the Velocity DUO card, or is it just running as a data card and your boot is from the Solo card? Thanks.
[doublepost=1515713186][/doublepost]

1. It should
2. Yes
3. Unlike the other poster I'm not 100% certain that even after CCC'ing the High Sierra install that it will boot. Check on the number of posts regarding both installing and trying to boot from RAID 0 drives and High Sierra (APFS or HFS+). High Sierra is (along with the firmware) doing a hardware check for Apple hardware. Apple is booting High Sierra from Raid 0 on the new iMac Pro, but chips are proprietary Apple modules.. There are issues with some of the older OWC modules for Macbook Pros as well, but there is a workaround to get to High Sierra.

If it’s AppleRAID issue, then I suspect it’s PCIe card independent.

 

[bsbeamer]

I have a solo and it will not boot in slot other than 1. Can firmware update fix that?

Unsure if it's firmware or not, but I can confirm from a rearrangement of drives this morning - my Apricorn Velocity Solo x2 does boot the system drive (SSD) when in PCI Slot 3 (3rd from bottom) in MacPro 5,1 running macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 (17C205). Apricorn Velocity Solo x2 Firmware was flashed (updated) by Apricorn in March 2015 when a Velocity Duo x2 was purchased. At the time they could not run at the same time in a machine without firmware update.

 

[jdryyz]

Well, I got hit with something today that wiped out my partition info....at least on the surface it would seem. The very last thing I did was install two Windows 7 updates prior to shutting down. When I booted back up, the system booted from my Backup drive (the next bootable volume) and neither of my RAID partitions were mounted!

The diskutil command still shows me two partitions on disk5 so that is a bit more comforting. Getting the Mac OS partition back is of lower priority. I've been doing more of my work lately on the Windows side. Something weird like this happened to me in the recent past but it only affected my ability to boot from the Windows side and both partitions were still mountable.

Can someone refer me to a drive/partition repair utility or some fancy command line options I can try to get them back? I am going to have to reconsider the reliability of this setup now that something strange has happened more than once. I've been leaning towards an SSD blade PCI adapter anyway. I could make that the primary system drive and reconfigure the RAID was one big Windows volume.

 

[adam9c1]

Parted magic?

 

[jdryyz]

Sounds promising. I think I will wait for a few more opinions before committing to something. As is always the case when something like this is lost, the very next thing you do could make any other repair attempts impossible.
[doublepost=1520629410][/doublepost]I've not used Parted Magic before but the Linux environment is somewhat familiar. I opened the only program I figured would help but my options seem pretty limited. I can do a scan of the unknown partition and see what it finds. Is this a read-only operation though?

My macOS partition is not seen at all. I can understand that. The software does not support all file systems. Interesting to note also, the screencap I took of my terminal windows shows Apple_HFS not APFS so that might be a bad sign. I wonder if it would be best to attempt a repair from a macOS standpoint even though the Windows partition matters more right now.

 

[stix666]

I have windows 10 on a SSD currently in a SATA II bay. I'd like to put that into one of the slots of my apricorn velocity duo but when I do, I get a no bootable disk error. Is there anyway to update the windows drivers for the velocity duo card manually in windows 10?

 

[h9826790]

I have windows 10 on a SSD currently in a SATA II bay. I'd like to put that into one of the slots of my apricorn velocity duo but when I do, I get a no bootable disk error. Is there anyway to update the windows drivers for the velocity duo card manually in windows 10?

It can’t be driver related.

Driver only works AFTER you booted into a operating system. It’s impossible to rely on a driver to boot.

 

[hfg]

I have windows 10 on a SSD currently in a SATA II bay. I'd like to put that into one of the slots of my apricorn velocity duo but when I do, I get a no bootable disk error. Is there anyway to update the windows drivers for the velocity duo card manually in windows 10?

Have you tried booting Windows from the SATA II Bay with the Velocity duo card installed in one of your slots so that Windows will see it and load the drivers? Then shut down and move your SSD over to the Velocity card and see if it now boots.

I am running mine that way on a Velocity Duo card in a 2012 Mac Pro

 

[jdryyz]

No luck on this.

It scanned for a while but found nothing to recover.

Sounds promising. I think I will wait for a few more opinions before committing to something. As is always the case when something like this is lost, the very next thing you do could make any other repair attempts impossible.
[doublepost=1520629410][/doublepost]I've not used Parted Magic before but the Linux environment is somewhat familiar. I opened the only program I figured would help but my options seem pretty limited. I can do a scan of the unknown partition and see what it finds. Is this a read-only operation though?

My macOS partition is not seen at all. I can understand that. The software does not support all file systems. Interesting to note also, the screencap I took of my terminal windows shows Apple_HFS not APFS so that might be a bad sign. I wonder if it would be best to attempt a repair from a macOS standpoint even though the Windows partition matters more right now.

[doublepost=1520719065][/doublepost]It has been pointed out to me that there is no 500GB drive shown with diskutil. Either the RAID is damaged or one of the 250GB drives has failed.

Is there any possibility of recovering from whatever is still visible using some fancy tools?

Well, I got hit with something today that wiped out my partition info....at least on the surface it would seem. The very last thing I did was install two Windows 7 updates prior to shutting down. When I booted back up, the system booted from my Backup drive (the next bootable volume) and neither of my RAID partitions were mounted!

The diskutil command still shows me two partitions on disk5 so that is a bit more comforting. Getting the Mac OS partition back is of lower priority. I've been doing more of my work lately on the Windows side. Something weird like this happened to me in the recent past but it only affected my ability to boot from the Windows side and both partitions were still mountable.

Can someone refer me to a drive/partition repair utility or some fancy command line options I can try to get them back? I am going to have to reconsider the reliability of this setup now that something strange has happened more than once. I've been leaning towards an SSD blade PCI adapter anyway. I could make that the primary system drive and reconfigure the RAID was one big Windows volume.

 

[Auggie]

Is there any possibility of recovering from whatever is still visible using some fancy tools?

Not that I'm aware of, or at least, the files that may be recovered would be severely corrupted.

And since this an SSD, I don't know if traditional drive recovery services would be able to recover anything from it either, or at the very least, it will be VERY expensive...

 

[jdryyz]

I had to move the Velocity card back into a compatible PC so I could access the BIOS setup. It still shows two SSDs but SSD 1 is no longer part of the RAID. Got a response from Apricorn suggesting that I see if Spinrite will help repair it.

Not that I'm aware of, or at least, the files that may be recovered would be severely corrupted.

And since this an SSD, I don't know if traditional drive recovery services would be able to recover anything from it either, or at the very least, it will be VERY expensive...

 

[jdryyz]

No help from Spinrite (it found no errors). I used Raid Recovery 5.3 with my two separate SSDs installed in another computer. It successfully recognized the RAID structure, and after a long scan, it did a pretty good job of letting me browse the files/folders contained in the NTFS partition. Unfortunately, I have not yet located the folders I am looking to recover the most. They might be sorted under "unknown files". Another problem, though- the cost to get the full recovery options enabled outweighs the value of the data. I want it, but not that bad.

 

[poop4]

has anyone compared the speeds of software vs. hardware raid0 with the velocity duo? obviously on the osx side of things, or can you not install osx on hardware raid?

 

[Auggie]

has anyone compared the speeds of software vs. hardware raid0 with the velocity duo? obviously on the osx side of things, or can you not install osx on hardware raid?

I haven't performed any benchmarks but I'm sure hardware will always be faster than software RAID.

And I do have OS X installed (recently upgraded my High Sierra to Mojave) on my hardware RAID Velocity Duo...

 

[Spacedust]

I've been testing some of the enterprise class PCIe cards just to boot them with Windows 7 under BootCamp.

I use 16 GB SSD SanDisk drive as a boot manager drive or these cards won't boot without it and Mac Pro will take longer to boot. It must be formatted as NTFS.

So far I've tested:

- Areca RAID cards (1210, 1212, 1231, 1680. 1880, 1882) - slow to initialize, PCIe 2.0 8x speeds, faster models are very hot, visibile under macOS)
- Seagate Nytro XP6302 3.5 TB (bootable with helper SSD, PCIe 1.1 8x speeds, very hot, slow to initialize)
- Huawei Tecal ES3000 1.2 TB (non-bootable at all, but superb PCI 2.0 8x speeds, extremely hot, instant initialization)
- Corerise Comay BladeDrive E28 800 GB (bootable with helper SSD, PCIe 2.0 8x speeds, great cooling and fast initialization)

Basically stay away of all newer cards with PCIe 3.0 8x as they all will be running as PCIe 1.1 8x cards.

 

[handheldgames]

I've been testing some of the enterprise class PCIe cards just to boot them with Windows 7 under BootCamp.

I use 16 GB SSD SanDisk drive as a boot manager drive or these cards won't boot without it and Mac Pro will take longer to boot. It must be formatted as NTFS.

So far I've tested:

- Areca RAID cards (1210, 1212, 1231, 1680. 1880, 1882) - slow to initialize, PCIe 2.0 8x speeds, faster models are very hot, visibile under macOS)
- Seagate Nytro XP6302 3.5 TB (bootable with helper SSD, PCIe 1.1 8x speeds, very hot, slow to initialize)
- Huawei Tecal ES3000 1.2 TB (non-bootable at all, but superb PCI 2.0 8x speeds, extremely hot, instant initialization)
- Corerise Comay BladeDrive E28 800 GB (bootable with helper SSD, PCIe 2.0 8x speeds, great cooling and fast initialization)

Basically stay away of all newer cards with PCIe 3.0 8x as they all will be running as PCIe 1.1 8x cards.

Thanks for sharing. Are the PCIe 3.0 cards responsive to PCI Tools / setpci ? The Highpoint SSD7101-a is a PCIe 3.0 M.2 PLX and it responds to setpci, delivering 16x PCIe 2.0 - 6000MB/sec + speeds. Its cool running with a fan.

 

[stix666]

I use 16 GB SSD SanDisk drive as a boot manager drive or these cards won't boot without it and Mac Pro will take longer to boot. It must be formatted as NTFS.

Can you elaborate on how you do this? Is the boot manager drive in a SATA II bay? What is installed on it? How do you install OSs to the PCIE drives etc?

I have an Apricorn velocity duo and also a mSata card but am struggling to do a functioning windows 10 installation on either of these.

 

[Spacedust]

I haven't tested setpci, but all these drives are visible under macOS as Other storage device, so just needs drivers.

I got all 4 main drive bays occupied so the only left SATA port is inside optical drive bay (second one, as the first is used by Superdrive).

It's quite easy:

- make a VHD image of your current Windows installation with Disk2VHD (make sure the output is VHD not VHDX - max partition size is 2.2 TB)
- format the 16 GB SSD drive as NFTS + MBR (no GPT for Windows 7)
- install Windows 7 on it
- boot Windows from 16 GB SSD
- install PCIe disk Windows drivers
- restore VHD image to your PCIe drive with WinImage
- prepare pendrive with your PCIe drivers on your pendrive
- boot into recovery mode (boot from Windows 7 and click Repair computer)
- it will only show this Windows installation is on this disk)
- click Load drivers and load PCIe disk drivers
- it will find another installation on your PCIe and add it to the boot manager
- simply choose second position Windows 7 (recovered) and you will boot from your PCIe SSD
- then just edit boot manager with EasyBCD so it will always boot as first

The funny thing is this BladeDrive even has SMART support and it show as 800 GB SATA3 device. CrystalDiskInfo speeds are awesome - 3,1 GB/s reads and 1,8 GB/s writes.

 

[Fulbert]

Hello to All,
I use mac Pro 5.1 (mid-2012) BootRom MP51.0089.B00 with High Sierra.

An Apricorn Solo X2 DUO PCI SSD card allows me to boot with MacOS (SSD 1) or Windows 10 (SSD 2).
If I switch to Mojave with a BootRom 144.0.0.0.0 is what the Apricorn Solo X2 DUO card will always work, if a persoone is in the same configuration and could enlighten me, thank you (sorry for my english)