Volume initializing in RAID Utility

One of our Xserves was hung up today so I forced it off and restarted. The system has a RAID card and two 80GB drives mirrored. When the computer turned back on it flashed the folder question mark icon, it couldn't find a startup disk. Meanwhile the blue lights on the two drives were flashing. I inserted the OS DVD and it booted from that. Disk utility doesn't see the boot volume. RAID utility shows green lights for the two drives, but a yellow light for the volume and is currently Initializing.
Did I just lose my boot volume? Or is RAID Utility rebuilding the volume and it will come back as before (please)?

Twitter user @atunnell suggested
Try putting it into a USB to SATA dock or adaptor and seeing if you can see it that way, RAID card itself may be the issue.
I did that and the drive still contained the original boot volume. That was good news.
So @atunnell suggested
I would use carbon clone to make a back up and then wipe the main disks and try a re initialize If that works then restore the image
I did that and it worked!
So I'm all set for now. Thank you @atunnell !

Similar Messages

Raid Utility wont Initialize a volume

Hi.
My Raid Utility won't initialize last two volumes. I have 3 tasks, 2 volume initialize tasks are Suspended, after that there is one Rebuild task that has a Scheduled status (the loading bar, no status bar). I did some digging and cleared all the events in the Controller status list. Both volumes are working, but won't initialize ? I tried rebooting, i got few more events that raid card started the rebuild process, then aborted it, then started it again, then aborted, and then started again. General status is Raid is rebuilding, but still I am not seeing the real status bar, like i saw last time. Is it really doing something or jammed?
It looks like the 2 suspended tasks would be preventing the rebuild to start, but the event log says it has started. Will the volumes initialize properly after the rebuild or do I need to get them to initialize them somehow before the rebuild can start?

Usually the drives have to be formatted separately as well as partitioned separately.
However, I don't quite understand what you are doing. You currently have four 500 GB drives configured as a RAID 0+1 which I would understand to mean two 500 GB drives striped, a second pair striped. That is two 1 TB striped arrays that are then combined into a mirrored array which would be 1TB. Now as I understand you want to resize one 500 GB drive that is already in the array. This I don't get.

I replaced the battery on my RAID card, when I booted my mac pro up, I get the folder with the question mark. I used a boot USB drive to boot and when I looked in the RAID utility, my RAID 5 volumes were no longer showing, advise.

I replaced the battery on my RAID card, when I booted my mac pro up, I get the folder with the question mark. I used a boot USB drive to boot and when I looked in the RAID utility, my RAID 5 volumes were no longer showing, advise.
Ernest

Not sure if I'm following you. I have 4 hard drives installed on my Mac Pro. I had a RAID 5 configured and functional for about 5 months. My battery died on the RAID card. I replaced the battery, seated the RAID card back in the slot I removed it from. When I booted to the USB drive to look in the RAID utility, I could see the battery is charged but my volumes are not showing.
The drives don't show in disk Utility. I built the RAID with the RAID Utility and they did show there. I have a early 2008 Mac Pro, Mavricks OS running Mac Server

RAID Utility - Resize Volume?

Hi,
I've got a Mac Pro with a hardware RAID0+1, 4 x 500GB disks giving me a maximum of 1TB (ish) of storage.
Thing is, the last 500GB disk was an addition and now I want to resize the original 500GB volume to use the full 1TB of storage offered by the array. I can't see an easy way to do it in RAID utility. Is it me or is this something that can't be done?
Cheers,
Stu

Usually the drives have to be formatted separately as well as partitioned separately.
However, I don't quite understand what you are doing. You currently have four 500 GB drives configured as a RAID 0+1 which I would understand to mean two 500 GB drives striped, a second pair striped. That is two 1 TB striped arrays that are then combined into a mirrored array which would be 1TB. Now as I understand you want to resize one 500 GB drive that is already in the array. This I don't get.

Xserve RAID volume corruption, volumes missing in Disk Utility

I have an Xserve with 3 drives in a RAID 5 set. The RAID set is divided into 2 volumes. After hard booting the server to recover from a crash, the volumes seemed to disappear.
We booted to an install disk and ran Disk Utility, which showed that there were no volumes at all. We then ran RAID Utility, which showed the volumes there.
After the RAID ran a re-initialization and verify, RAID Utility shows green lights throughout, as if everything is fine. Nothing else, however, can see the volumes.
We booted to an external drive with OS X installed, and basically found the same situation. Only RAID Utility can see those volumes, but otherwise they're just plain missing. However, RAID Utility does show "Partitions: None" for both of those volumes.
We have tried placing the drives into another server to determine if the problem is with the RAID card, but we had the same results. I also tried booting to target disk mode, but the other machine can't see the volumes all the same.
Using an external boot disk, we upgraded the RAID firmware. We also reset the SMC, as well as the PRAM. Nothing is working so far.
AppleCare basically told me that we're SOL and have to rebuild. Unfortunately, there is some data there which was overlooked in our backup procedure. If there is any possibility of recovering the data, I'd like to try it before giving up.
My absolute last option is to recreate the volumes exactly as they were before, then hope that I can use some manner of un-erase to recover the data. However, I'm not sure how RAID works on that level, should it just jumble the data, or if this is even remotely a feasible option.

Port 1: Link Established
2Gps
Point to point
Status light green
In the system Profiler I'm not sure what you're asking for, I'm running 10.5.8 standard not server.
the fibre channel shows link established 2Gps and cable type copper but nothing else, the disks & RAID controller don't show up anywhere I've looked.
RAID Admin shows the JBOD disks as online and lists the LUNs etc.
System looks fine, only error is missing second power supply.

Time to Initialize Volume in a RAID 5 Set?

On a brand new Mac Pro 12 Core machine with an Apple RAID card, I created a new RAID 5 set with 4 2 TB drives for a total of 5.23 TB using the RAID Utility after booting from the Install DVD. However, when I then create one volume (Macintosh HD), it gets created just fine, but stays on Initializing forever. Task says it's running the Initialization, but the blue on the progress bar is barely moving. How long should this Initialization step take? Someone please help! Thanks!

I am in the same boat with same hardware. Raid Migration took 8 hours. Initialization step still going at 30+ hours. I actually have called support on this and am waiting for a full explanation to resolve. I have tried canceling the process and starting over. However, Disk Utility will not respond. I have tried rebooting and when I open the RAID Utility it still shows 2 percent remaining in initialization. I am curious "CJM53BIWA", you posted your message on March 2nd, were you able to resolve the issue?

Expand volume on Internal RAID

Hello,
I set up our new Xserve with three 1TB internal disks. I booted it up, and did all the initial setup. However, I made a booboo I think when migrating the volume to RAID....
Once it was up and running, I went into the RAID admin util, and told it to migrate to a RAID 5 volume.
Unfortunately, it just migrated the one disk size to the new volume, so I now have a 1.78TB RAID set, with a (slightly under) 1TB volume, and 800 odd gigs of free space.
Question is, is there any way to expand that volume out to use the entire space, or do I have to start from scratch?...

OK, well, for the benefit of others, heres how I solved it..
Got a 500G firewire disk, and used Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable volume on the fw disk.
Rebooted from the fw disk, and as a belts and braces approach, did a block level backup of the server disk to a .dmg file on the fw disk.
Once completed, I went into the raid utility, zapped the entire raid and recreated it with just one volume.
I then used CCC to restore the block level .dmg file back onto the newly configured raid and rebooted off the raid.
Job done. The entire process took about 45 minutes. Admittedly, there was only about 14 gig of data to move about, but was very quick all things considered.

Raid utility

My new Mac Pro with OSX Snow Leopard Server arrived a few weeks ago and since then I am trying to configure teh RAID (5) Set via RAID Utility but it keeps freezing on final percentage of the blue bar - Initializing... I tryed to reboot several times, also to delete the RAID Set or the Volume but still get no answer or evolution in the process. Any suggestions?

Although Apple advertises the RAID utility as a way to turn multiple disks into a single RAID without data loss, you cannot consolidate or expand the capacity of an existing volume.
My guess as to what happened on my machine is that the RAID utility miscalculated the available space in the RAID set and failed to automatically create my new, second volume.
So you have a choice: either make a second volume out of the remaining space in your RAID set or else delete the volume, create a new volume with all remaining space and either reinstall or restore from backup. Since setting up the RAID was the first thing I did after opening the box, I chose to just reinstall the OS. I don't see the benefit in having multiple volumes if they are all from the same RAID set.
In either case with RAID5 you're only going to have 2.5-3TB from four 1TB drives due to the parity data. I got a single 730GB volume from four 300GB drives, but it's worth it to me to get the increased stability of RAID5 over simple striping (since four drives are four times as likely to have a failure than a single drive by itself).

Advice on RAID Sets, Volume Sets, and RAID Levels of the Volume Sets using an Areca Controller

I have read through a lot of information on disk usage, storage rules for an editing rig, users inquiries/member responses in this forum and I thank each and every one of you – especially Harm.
In building my new workstation, I purchased five (5) WD 1T, 7k, 64M SATAIII hard drives and an Areca RAID card, ARC-1880ix-16-4G, which I plan to use primarily as my media/data disk array. The workstation will use a 128GB SATAIII SSD as the OS/program drive and I will transfer two (2) WD Raptor/10k SATA 70GB drives from my current system for pagefile/scratch/render use. I tentatively plan on using a mobo SATAIII port for the SSD and mobo SATA ports with a software RAID (level 0) for the 10k Raptors.
In reading the Areca Instruction manual, I am now considering exactly how I should configure the 5 physical 1TB drives in terms of RAID Level(s), Volume Sets, and RAID Sets. I must admit that I like the opportunity of allowing for a Dedicated Hot Spare as I am generally distrustful of the MTBF data that drive vendors tout and have the bad experience in the past of losing data from a mal-configured RAID array and a single drive hardware failure (admittedly, my fault!).
In line with the logic that one doesn’t want to perform disk reading while trying to write at the same time (or vice-versa), I am thinking the approach above should work OK in using the mobo disk interface and both software and external hardware RAID controllers without having to create separate RAID level configurations within a Volume Set or further dividing up the physical drives into separate RAID sets. I know in forum messages that Harm noted that he had 17 drives and I could envision a benefit to having separate RAID sets in that situation, but I am not at that point yet.
To some degree I think it might be best to just create one RAID Level on one Volume Set on one RAID Set, but want to solicit thoughts from veteran controller users on their workflows/thoughts in these regards.
Anyone care to share thoughts/perspectives? Thanks
Bill

Thanks for the speedy feedback Harm - I appreciate it.
I was thinking RAID level 3 as well.
Of course, it's always something! I purchased the Caviar Blacks by mistake - which are non-TLER. I will work with EggHead to return the ones I purchased and replace them with RE4 versions as I'm not thrilled about the possibility of the controller declaring the volume/disks degraded unnecessarily and although I have the DOS utility WDTLER where one is supposed to be able to enable/disable TLER on WD drives - I suspect WD is way beyond that now anyway with current builds.
I agree with you about just testing the performance of the options for the raptors - on the mobo and then on the controller. When I benchmark them I'll post the results in case others are curious.
Thanks again....off to EggHead!

RAID Utility software not available in OS X Mavericks?

Up till yesterday I have been using a RAID card in my Mac Pro (Mid 2010, 4 x 1 TB SATA, initially as RAID-5, now in a RAID-10 setup) under OS X 10.8.5 without any issues, and the RAID utility allowed me to check the status od me disks, event log, and the battery status / refresh cycles for the RAID card. Last night now I upgraded to OS X Mavericks. The upgrade went well, things appear to work OK, obviously at least half of my RAID-10 array is in use — however, I can't find the RAID utility, check the status of the RAID-10 system and the battery status of the RAID card. The disk utility shows the RAID set - but none of the underlying features (individual disks and their status, logs, battery) — am I thrown back to a soft RAID, and my investment into a RAID card has evaporated?

Thanks a lot, Seliqui! the reason why I did not find it is that a) after the upgrade to Mavericks, the icon that I previously had parked in the dock no longer worked, and b) the new location for the utility can't be found anywhere on the Launchpad. I suspect both effects are an indication that they missed to add the new directory to the command path. I can hardly imagine that this was deliberate because if you have a RAID card you definitely want to have access to that utility — not just in case of a disk failure (I have had a couple of these!), but also in order to stop the user from doing things one is not supposed to do while the battery is reconditioning.

Intel Mac Tower / RAID Utility question

I have a new Intel Mac tower with three 500 gb hard drives and a RAID card inside. I am attempting to create a RAID5 with 2 partitions (one 60 gb for os and other programs, and another partition with just under 900 gb for file sharing) - Trying to install mac osx tiger server (10 Client version) on my 60gb partition. I was able to do the following: boot machine from Client Install CD that came with the tower(as far as I know the tiger server os disk that I purchased does not have a RAID utility on it), used the RAID utility to create a RAID5, used the RAID utility to create the 2 partitions. Everything appears to work just fine after the RAID builds and partitions are created on them. Now if I either attempt to boot from the install disk for either mac os x server, OR from mac os x client os, I get to the point where you choose the partition (or volume) to install the os on, and I see NO VOLUME in the window below. Am I doing something wrong? If I need to give more detail please let me know.
Thanks for any help in advance!
Eric

Hi there ... i think i see what your issue is about.
1) You bought a new MacPro CTO with the Raid card and want to turn your internal into a Raid 5 install.
2) The raid card is again spanking brand new hardware in the machine and the actual support for the card does not come before 10.5 Server which is still on the way but you can certainly circumvent the issue with using a external drive install 10.4.x on the external and clone the external to your internal raid 5 to use as your boot drive.
3) Make certain your partition on your 10.4 install is GUID on your raid. This is found in the Disk Utility options under the partition tab.
4) Make sure your Mac os X server install DVD is 10.4.x Universal .. Do not use a 10.4 Server for PPC on a MacPro you ll meet 20 tons of worries . I would as well run the updates on the external drive first so when you clone you are up to 10.4.10 with all appropriate updates and utilities . As a safety measure installing your AppleRaid Card utility on the external drive would be a wise move so if they are updates to the utility they shall be taken into account.
For a good clonning utility look for carbon copy cloner . it is not one of the fastest cloners out there but it is ROCK solid and fully supports 10.4.x server and a life saver as well.

Raid Utility not an option on Lion Recovery Disk

I am trying to delete a single RAID set that includes the startup volume. I booted up with the Lion Recovery disk but only the disk utility is available as an option to erase information and no RAID utility is there. I erased the startup volume and am re-installing. If this doesn't fix the system so that I can try recreating the RAID set, does anyone have suggestions how to get back to the original four 2TB drives?
Thanks, Alison

To refine what the Hatter is saying...
1) take an external drive. (USB is really slow, but can be used in a pinch. Firewire interface is much faster, and worth the price difference. It should be a 3.5" drive, and have its own power supply.)
2) Install Mac OS X on the External drive.
3) Boot from the External drive. Now you have the full capabilities of Mac OS X to act on everything else in your Mac.
The Hatter often proposes that:
... rather than using a Utilities/Installer DVD or Recovery_HD to Install Mac OS X on an External drive from scratch, you can do just as good a job (and get a "free" bootable backup in the process) by:
2alt) Cloning from an existing Mac OS X drive to that same External drive.
[I am not sure you have that option at the moment, but it may be available when your system is stable again.]

Raid Utility Error Message "raid utility is not supported on this computer"

I am not doing anything that I know of, but Raid Utility keeps opening up on its own, and a message pops up multiple times a day telling me "raid utility is not supported on this computer"
Anyone have any idea how to fix this?

Network startup is if you want to start your macbook using a network drive.
Keep your startup settings at your current drive.
Raid utility doesn't apply to you since you only have one hard drive installed, unless you installed another hard drive in your optical bay.
Fibre Channel is another type of hard drive connection via network connection.
You can't access things you don't have installed in your macbook. Those are there in case you decide to have a network drive start up options, a raid configuration of a fibre channel network drive.

RAID Utility does not work after Vista upgrade

Hi,
I have a Qosmio G30 with 2 HD 120GB each. After I upgraded to Windows Vista from Windows XP, the Toshiba RAID Utility does not work anymore. In WXp it worked OK, but in Vista there is no way I can mirror the HD. That is, the utility itself work, but the button that should say Mirror, or something like that is not shown. I have set the drives to RAID-1 in the BIOS, but no go.
Is there any way to get the software RAID to work again?

Hi,
just a little question: While installing vista, did you installed the RAID-driver at installation time? Maybe this could be the reason why RAID cannot be activated properly.
Please give some feedback, if you installed the RAID drivers for Vista during the installation..
Cheers

RAID Utility & RAID Card

I have my new super-duper Mac Pro tower 3.2 GHz with RAID card and I installed 4 identical 1 TB drives and made a RAID 5 array. Now, the issue is that I have had two power outages, and my UPS seems to have missed picking them up (I have a new UPS now for the tower), but here is the deal, I get the bad event, clear the event log, "initialize" the array (~1 day), Verify the array (~3 days) and RAID Utility can still give me the message that the array is "bad".
So, I have, in sequence, a failure, a rebuild, a verify, a reboot (clean) and it goes back and complains it needs to rebuild from scratch even though it already has done so ...
Also, clearing the errors does not seem to clear the errors from the log ...
So, is it me ... or does the RAID Utility stink?

FeistMeister wrote:
Um, that was the point.
I did a rebuild between the crash and the next one, and a verify ...
I missed that.
And after the second crash I did a complete initialize and verify with clean bill of health and all green dots....
Now I am 3-4% into the initialize which will take until tomorrow sometime to finish ... then I can reverify ... but the point is that it does not seem to want to forget the past ... and "clearing" the log does not seem to make it forget the past either ...
Well, it still boots off the array, and seems to run fine so I suppose I should not be TOO annoyed, but I expected better from Apple ... and better speed off of a dedicated $800 RAID card ... Oh, and the battery is fully charged ....
I have never used RAID, probably because I never needed, but also I have read here and there of the requisite maintenance needed, and of problems similar to yours.
I wish you well.

Volume initializing in RAID Utility

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