MP 7,1 Free reboots! OWC Thunderbay + Disk utility

[cobra521]

I have a Mac Pro 7,1 using MacOS 10.15.5. I added a Thunderbay 8/Thunderbolt 3 external storage unit. I set up 5 of the drives as RAID5 using SoftRAID and the other 3 are set up as JBOD.

So far, so good. The thing runs OK.

Then I got a larger drive to replace one of the smaller ones in the RAID5. I removed the smaller drive and installed the larger one, and used SoftRAID to add it in to the RAID5. That seems to work OK too. I now have a bigger RAID5 volume, around 24TB.

Now here comes the fun: I installed the removed drive in place of one of the JBOD drives, since it was larger. Then I tried to reformat the removed drive using Disk utility. Instant reboot! Every time I tried to Erase the former RAID5 drive, the Mac rebooted.

So I tried to repartition it using Disk Utility. No luck; nothing but error messages. At least no reboot.

Then I removed the drive and connected it to the Mac via USB, using a Plugable tray. Same result: Erase == instant reboot. So it would seem it is the drive, not the housing. Probably.

My better half has a PC with Windows 10, so I took the USB connection there, and with the help of Windows Disk Manager, managed to fairly easily reformat the drive. No reboot for Windows!

Back to the Mac where the drive is now immediately recognized, and it could be erased successfully.

It's fascinating that a wrongly formatted drive could reboot MacOS 10.15.5, which means to me that somehow the Apple OS is, um, delicate...

Can anyone tell me how I might have managed to overcome this problem on the Mac with reverting to a Windows PC? Or is there something else that could be done to prevent this problem? Software? Voodoo?

The more I use this Mac, the less I think of Apple...

Tom

 

[eflx]

You think less of Apple because of what seems like an extremely random glitch you just happened to solve formatting the drive in Windows?

First thing's first ... SoftRAID is garbage, and OWC is a low-tier brand. No worries, I've used them too as they do seem to provide a lot of attractive and affordable storage solutions & cheap no-name RAM if you're into that too with a "lifetime warranty" (ie. we know our RAM sucks, but rest assured we'll send you new sticks when it dies)

I've had a ton of stability issues, and issues with drives not being recognized, sporadically ejected, and otherwise "trashing" drives that worked once removed from the OWC enclosure, and re-formatted with something else.

Little bit of a whiny rant if I do say so What can I say, I'm bored and haven't fallen asleep yet haha so here's your reply

 

[xtol121]

I just received my M.2 Accelsior Card which comes set up with SoftRAID. Since I only want to use RAID 0, I figured I wouldn't need SoftRAID. Went to reformat and setup the RAID 0 using Disk Utility and boom, instant reboot. Took me 30 minutes of banging my head and searching the internet when I found this post.

BTW, when using the Accelsior one can use the included SoftRAID to reconfigure and re-format the pre-installed SoftRAID RAID-0 back to 4 separate Apple HFS+ blades/devices. Once this is done, then Apple's Disk Utility (DU) can be used to configure the 4 HFS+ blades/devices as RAID-0, and thus live with using Apple's DU for managing the Accelsior and abandon the use of the included SoftRAID.

Not sure if it will work for you, but installing SoftRAID, formatting the volume to HFS+, and then using Disk Utility worked for me. My situation is admittedly a bit different, but it sounds like a similar issue, hope this helps!

 

[cobra521]

xtol,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll likely repeat the process of replacing a smaller drive with a larger sometime in the next two weeks. I'll try that route (I already have SoftRAID) and report back.

Tom

 

[cobra521]

I tried Softraid. It almost worked - it left the disk with two volumes where I really wanted only one. After it rebooted my Mac. I ended up taking the disk to a Windows 10 PC to reformat - still couldn't get rid of an extra 8MB volume that Softraid apparently left behind. I even tried fsck in Terminal. No real progress.

Finally, after the PC session, I went back to Disk Utility and was successful after I realized I needed to reformat (erase) the whole parent disk. Trying to adjust the individual volumes on the disk was frustrating...

When I erased the parent disk, the result was one large partition. Whew!

Next time I do this, I'll take the disk straight to the PC to reformat, and then finish in Disk Utility.

It still is stunning that a strangely formatted disk can reboot the Mac Pro! Kinda seems the whole Mac is fragile, or balanced on a knife edge as far as the operating system is concerned. I wonder if the Boeing MAX programmers are somehow involved?