Bootable OSX86 Raid Walkthrough

[achromatic]

Almost but not quite there. When I reboot, I get the boot option of hd(0,3) "Boot OS X" (the little RAID partition at the end).

Selecting this gives me a kernel panic - "Unable to find driver for this platform: \"ACPI\".\n"@sourcecache/xnu/xnu-1228.9.59/iokit/Kernel/IOPlatformExpert.cpp:1407

Do I need to install a kext? I didn't need to install any ACPI kexts when I was in single boot drive mode, the panic only happens now that I'm trying to boot from Soft RAID.

[aquamac]

No you do not need any kexts. Did you remember to include the Raid id in the com.apple.boot.plist? If your system was previously working then cloning will be fine. Go through all the steps again, you must have missed something. Do you still have your HDD's set to AHCI as they should be?

[stopthebus]

Thanks

Edit: Can I update Chameleon? If yes, can you give me some pointers please.

[c0rk007hck]

Do you need a card, or is it a free option in mac??
Or do you need a onboard raid?
I don't understand what i need.

I'm thinking to make a raid0 with 4 x sata.

[aquamac]

You do not need a card, just follow the walkthrough and use disk utility to create your raid array. You just need a minimum of 2 identical hard disks.

Good Luck.

[mammoth]

Hey all, I might need some help with the RAID setup I want to use.

I'm getting a Highpoint RocketRAID 3320 PCI-e x8 card today and I want to set it up with 2 mirrored 650GB drives for OS X 10.5.6, and then 4 1TB drives in a RAID 5 for data. I want to be able to boot off of the mirrored pair and use the hardware RAID of the card.

Do you think this can be done? If so, any help would be great.

Thanks!

[themaniac84]

If u r going to set up a Raid from your initial instal via a retail mac osx disk would follow the same steps listed in the original post?

[aliomattux]

Hi, I could use some help please. I followed your instructions exactly to the letter but whenever I try the dd part it ALWAYS says resource busy and therefore fails. If I unmount the raid disk and then try it, it will work but it will not mount. Thanks.

[aliomattux]

I think that I found part of the problem. I had raid turned on in my bios settings although it was not raided from the utility. I disabled it and was able to write the files to it but now I cannot get it to mount no matter what. I am almost there please help. Thanks.

[aquamac]

You need to set your bios to AHCI for starters. When you enter the command:

diskutil unmount disk2s3

your disk should unmount.

When you enter diskutil list check the numbers of the hard drives that are included in your raid setup. Although I have shown "disk2s3" say as one of my disks, yours may have a different number. Also did you put the raid identifier number in your com.apple.boot.plist after you had raided the disks in disk utility?

What I tend to do as some of the commands are quite long in to put all the commands I need for my setup into something like text edit, then I can copy and paste them across into the Terminal.

[aliomattux]

Thank you for responding so quickly. Ill try and give as much detail as possible so you only have to respond one. First of all my specs.

Ideneb 10.5.6 voodoo kernel
680i lt sli "yes sata works perfect"
4gig ram, "applied nforceata.kext fix"
2 160gb hard disks exactly same.

I am sorry but I dont exactly know what achi is and I have not seen this setting in the bios but I will most certainly look for it. I am not a noob, but the raid thing is new for me.

I dont mean to offend, but I am not completely stupid, ha, I already have matched the identifier perfectly in my plist file although I must report that when I add <key>device-properties> line it deletes it when I save it but it is listed later at the end of the file and yes I copied it word for word even though I did not write it correctly here. I do know that the disks settings are different and I did change it to say the correct values. I did delete the set and reformed it and I will look into ahci in bios and I will report back.

[aquamac]

Hi, did not mean to offend either.

When you put in the identifier you do not need to put in device properties, although that is shown, it is related to the next part of my com.apple.boot.plist. for GFX strings that follow.

You are only interested in adding these 2 lines:

<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>boot-uuid=948357DD-2F47-4EE6-8F22-294C275C8A90</string>

[aliomattux]

Well, I could not find any setting in the bios called ahci or anything that had it contained in it. I did retry all of the steps and the dd if=boot1h command worked but when I went to the mount command it said same, failed to mount. Any ideas?

When I ran the first command it didnt say anything but then the dd command said records in, records out. If that helps.

[aquamac]

The AHCI is usually one of the options if you set Raid in the bios. I do not have lots of experience of NVIDIA boards but the only one I ever owned (striker extreme) had it. Did you unpack all the files directly onto your desktop and cd to your desktop?

The first command does not say anything but the the second will just as you found.

[aliomattux]

Well, an odd turn of events. As I reported I still was not able to get it to boot or mount but for some strange reason the array now boots perfectly without the extra commands. I believe I have discovered an easier way of doing this.

First I installed my os on a single disk.
I then used the disk utility to form the array.
Then I used the restore feature in disk utility to restore my image to the array using the os disk as source and array as destination. See I have done this quite a few times for incompatible laptops. I have noticed that even after a restore through osx disk utility that it will still not boot.

So then I installed the chameleon installer package to the disk.
Then I added the unique id to the plist file and followed the steps up until the mount "where it failed" and it worked! Thanks for your help and I hope you can make sense and use my method. I will report bench findings and such later and check on using more than 2 disks.