how to tell if a disk is in a soft RAID? big problem.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I’ve got a problem here. Not sure what happened, but I just downloaded and ran the 10.3.8 update for a G4 machine we’ve just set up to run as a file server with just a few users.

I have a mirrored RAID array of two hard drives that was working fine and had no problems functioning and mounting. But, upon restarting from the update, I got a “you have inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OS X can read.” warning.

So I started to look for the problem, but all attached disks were mounted on the desktop and functional, so I’m thinking, “IS there a problem — why the warning?” So I theorize that maybe it’s one of the RAID disks that is the problem and the other one is OK, so it’s still allowing the volume to mount, but I don’t know if this is possible — I don’t know how the OS X RAID software works.

Upon further exploration disk utility won’t perform any verification, etc, on one of the RAID disks. This disk shows up as hardware, but there’s no indication in disk utility that it’s actually being recognized as a disk containing data. The other RAID disk’s report in disk utility shows the mirrored volume’s name as a volume on the second physical disk, but the volume name doesn’t show up under the disk in question.

So I’m a bit leery that the mirrored volume is really being written to both disks. I get this warning now every time I reboot the machine. I’m wondering if the system software is even recognizing the RAID configuration any more, or if it sees only one drive and is totally ignoring the other, thinking it is just un-initialized???

Any help? Much thanks.

[Author]

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