Adding Drive to Concatenated RAID in Disk Utility

Hello,
I'm having a spot of trouble with Disk Utility. 24 hours ago I added a new drive to a Concatenated Raid through Disk Utility, and clicked Update to set the process going.
Now it's not responding. It just claims to be updating. I struggle to believe that it takes this long though!
I didn't format the disk before adding it to the RAID. Is this what's causing the upset?
When I try to cancel it tells me I risk losing data on the disk. I'm not sure if it means the new disk or all disks on the array - which is a terrifying prospect. If I quit Disk Utility, will my existing data on the array be safe?
Thanks in advance for the help,
Ben

The drives are in Sonnet P500 enclosures and connected to the MacPro via a Sonnet SATA card.
On purhcase I was told this could be done, as it's a Concatenated JBOD setup. For a better description of what I mean by that, this wiki article describes it well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StandardRAIDlevels.
Does this provide any further clues?
Currently there are 7x 1TB drives in 2 enclosures. I've now added 2 more 1TB drives. I can currently see and continue to use the data on the existing 7 drives. My worry though is that if I quit the disk utility I may lose the data on the 7 original drives.

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"Create" button dim when attempting to setup mirrored RAID in Disk Utility.

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Thanks,
Scott

Hi there,
Thanks for your help!
Your explanation makes sense. I've just recovered from a hard drive failure and although I'd backed up most of the files the night before, I still lost a day's worth of email and several days worth of other files. Mirroring appealed to me because then I'd always have a completely up-to-date copy of everything, but your bad experiences with it give me pause.
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Scott

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Thanks

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Here is what I did to fix it:
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2. Make a disk image of the drive you want to mount, save this somewhere accessible (i saved it on another one of my RAID drives)
3. Erase the disk, it should then mount and be accessible
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Cheers!

Looking for opinions on Apple's software RAID in Disk Utility

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Disk Description : WD Elements 1023 Media                      Total Capacity : 500.11 GB (500,105,740,288 Bytes)
Connection Bus : USB                                                               Write Status : Read/Write
Connection Type : External                                                     S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
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Hello,
I have just experienced the same thing!
Although my external drive shows in Disk Utility, it does not show in Finder.
And the Verify/Repair buttons are also greyed out.
Also, although the drive is 2TB. DU shows it as having Total Capacity of only 4.14GB! (Which should be the Free Space).
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Internal hard drives won't appear in Disk Util

I have a bizarre problem with my hard drives now. I'm on a 2.4GHz Core2Duo Macbook Pro 15" with 10.5.4. I've switched the hard drive a couple of times before with no issues whatsoever. Now, with the exception of the brand new one that won't hold an install, my internal hard drives don't show up in the install disk's Disk Utility.
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I kind of feel like drawing a flowchart to show all that I've tried. Its difficult to keep everything intelligible while listing the entire last week's efforts at 2:45am. :-/
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=41951
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If I install OSX on them while in the USB enclosure, that works, but they will not mount when connected to the SATA cable inside the lappy. The platter style SATA drives won't even be recognized...
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Windows based WD external hard drive not showing up in Disk Utility to reformat to Mac... how can I erase the drive

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Hmm strange, I had just moved my external Lacie drive from my windows machine to my iMac and it was showing up in disk utility still formatted fat32 or whatever. I would disconnect the drive and restart the machine then replug the drive and try again.
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External hard drive won't unmount for disk utility.

Im not sure if this is the right topic area but I have a white macbook and my external hard drive won't unmount. I want to erase it via disk utility but it keeps telling me other programs are using it.

Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

Internal hard drive does not mount in disk utility

My internal hard drive no longer mounts in Disk Utility. It is grayed out. I have extraordinarily frequent spinning beach ball/freezes, in Safari or Apple Mail. The most recent symptom: upon rebooting or just starting up, I see flashing black on the display. This has been occuring for more than six months. Of course, I have made total and frequent backup's. I bought new RAM, but have not yet installed it, and I susect this might help. I have done repeted troubleshooting many times each: Apple's Disk Doctor, Repaired Permissions, Reinstalled the Mac OS, safe boot, Alsoft's Disk Warrior, Apple's longer Harware Test, etc. I have worked as a new user, too. All tests done report that all is well. What od you thnk the problem is? Must I drive 1.5 hrs. each way to the Genius Bar at my nearest Apple Store? Might I try to erase the hard drive as a fix? I hate to do this, only as a last resort, as it is so time-consuming. Should I just update my Mac OS? Please advise, out there, if anyone can offer any advice, I would be greatly appreciative.

The list of issues you posted probably would not get shorter if you attempt to 'upgrade them' away, as usually that kind of effort is not effective yet may expose more of the same problems while not necessarily revealing the original weakness. Another OS X installed over a set of problems seldom helps.
How full is the hard disk drive? If it is too full, or has been very busy in use several years, it may be time to replace the HDD and perhaps put a larger capacity one in the computer. And if the main computer hardware checks out OK (tested under a variety of duration and stress tests) then also consider a RAM upgrade if the device is not already at the maximum capacity.
When was the last time the hard disk drive was devoid of content, maybe wiped -- erased and reformatted by a third party disk utility or have a utility overwrite the entire HDD with zeros? This used to be a common tech service in the course of a major effort to restore a Mac. Or Defragment?
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I'd bet on a new hard disk drive of larger capacity (also note spin RPM rate and data speeds) and a full RAM upgrade.
If you have a backup clone on an external hard disk drive (in a boot-capable enclosure) you could really go to town and before you erase the main/only hard drive, make a backup clone and test its ability to boot the Mac. Or put the old drive and content in a suitable boot capable enclosure of the kind with its own power supply, and deal with it later.
Then consider a later version OS X -- whatever most recent version that model can support... {edited}
Good luck & happy computing!

My external drive won't mount. Disk Utility says it can't repair disk and to backup the disk and reformat, but how can I do that if it won't mount?

My external drive won't mount. Disk Utility says it can't repair disk and to backup the disk and reformat, but how can I do that if it won't mount?

See mount section in 1st linked article.
Disk Unmount Using Terminal
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Internal hard drive fails to mount in Disk Utility.

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Message was edited by: Flamingcreatures

Adding Drives to a RAID 5

I have a XSERVE RAID with 4 250GB drives configured as a RAID 5. We're starting to get low on space so I'd like to expand the capacity by adding some drives.
Is there a specific number of drives I need to add or can I add 1, 2 or 3 drives as long as they're on the same controller?
Mac OS X (10.4.6)

This is incorrect.
The Xserve RAID does not ship with any file system on it whatsoever. It is just disks, set up in a RAID configuration that you specify.
You can format the RAID volume as HFS+ if you connect it to a Mac. You can format it with NTFS if you connect it to a Windows machine. Or ZFS on a Solaris box, etc.
What you CANNOT easily do is grow a volume. Period.
Buy the RAID with 7 drives, or with 14 drives. If you buy a "2 TB" one (what is this -- 4x500 GB drives? Recall that is about 1.3 TB of usable space in RAID 5)... plan on reformatting if you add 3 drives later. Plan on it. I mean it: plan on it. Growing the RAID is complicated and unless you want to set up a concatenated RAID set, it's what you MUST do to grow the volume.
Again, my advice could not be clearer (search back as well, I've stated this many, many times): Buy the RAID with 7 drives, or with 14, and NEVER plan on growing the RAID by adding drives WITHOUT reformatting. Period.

Raid with disk utility

Hi there
I have an odd setup, however let me explain the whole situation.
I recently bought 2 external firewire drives with the idea of setting up a raid mirror so i could backup all my data safely.
However, it appears I cannot plug both drives into my mac at the same time using firewire, or they drop off the mac. I have read some other forums and found that you need to plug each drive on a different firewire card. As my G4 has only the one set of ports this is not possible without buying an additional pci card.
However they support usb as well. I can plug one drive in as firewire and the other via the usb at the same time fine, but now cant get the disk utility to raid the drives.
Is there a way to do this or to "trick" osx into thinking they are both firewire drives? Any hack or workaround welcome - even if it requires editing odd files via the terminal as this is a test system anyway and can reinstall if i need to.
Pete

Hi Pete;
RAID 1 or mirroring is NOT a good backup solution.
The primary purpose for RAID 1 is to protect from disk failure.
By way of an example as to why RAID is not a backup solution, consider what would happen if you had an application which had a dozen files opened. The application aborted taking all of the file with it.
How could recover with RAID 1? You could not because as soon as the application aborted all of the files would be removed from all of the disk in the RAID array. You would have no way to recover without a backup of the data. Hence data on RAID 1 must be backed up.
If you still want to create this RAID 1 array, I would certainly recommend that you don't mix USB and Firewire. Any RAID is dependent on the various parts of the array being similar as to connectivity and hardware.
Allan

RAID with Disk Utility question

I've setup a RAID array in disk utility for an external SATA NAS that I have. The Silicon Image Si3132 drivers are not working for Snow Leopard (the SATARAID 5 drivers) so I've installed the base non-raid drivers for 10.6.
I'm using Disk Utility to setup the RAID for now until I get updated drivers from SI. Here's my question:
Let's just say that my Mac Pro one day decides to die and I have to rebuild a new OS on the machine. I will then have this external drive where I've configured a software RAID with Mac OS X. Will I be able to rebuild this RAID and recover the data, or will I lose all of the data if the Mac needs to be rebuilt?
The external enclosure has its own controller, but these silicon image drivers do not seem to want to work as they are kernel panicking.
Will I be able to recover the RAID config with disk utility if I rebuild the machine? My thinking is NO

You have four internal hard drives; ability to boot from FW or USB, and I would include TimeMachine and clone (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper). Some WHS NAS servers also support TimeMachine and SuperDuper, but I would have local backups. Two minimum.
I would not rely on SI or RAID.
And all you need to boot from, and I'd have at least two, is a basic 30GB partition for Mac OS: a working copy of your system as is, a copy of last version installed also, AND, one "emergency" boot partition for disk maintenance and repairs.
Then use NAS as second line of backup for your data, disk images, etc.

My internal hard drives don't appear in disk utility. Can't install os X

Hi,
I have a macpro. In this computer are 4 1TB hard drives. They were set up as a raid set. I booted my comp with a snow leopard install disk and opened raid utility to delete the raid set so I can install os X on one hard drive and use the other hard drives to store files. After deleting the raid set, I opened disk utility to find no disks in which I can reformat or even install snow leopard. What steps do I take now to ensure all disks are useable and that I can install my operating system on one of them?

Drive Preparation
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
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Once you have one drive reformatted you can quit DU and install OS X.

Adding Drive to Concatenated RAID in Disk Utility

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