MacExcellence

SoftRAID 3.6.6 offers fixes, workarounds for Leopard compatibility

Thu, January 24, 2008

SoftRAID offers several updates via beta run, then a release of v3.6.6 to address issues

It was about a Month.5 ago that I lost a 400GB RAID stripe when attempting to follow early instructions from SoftRAID. They were working on a fix for the inability to install Apple’s new OS — “Leopard” — on PPC Macs running SoftRAID.

The issue was that the Leopard installer wouldn’t see the SoftRAID volume as ‘eligible.’ Since I really wanted to get started with Leopard, I begged for the betas and they obliged. (Translated: “I’m an idiot.")

The fix, SoftRAID support said, was to try a new feature that would allow one to convert existing SoftRAIDs to Apple format, install Leopard, and then re-convert back to SoftRAID format. Sounded like a plan.

When I followed the directions (to the “T") I wound up with a broken stripe. It could not be repaired, and — to make a long story short — SoftRAID support mounted an Herculean effort on my behalf to try to figure out what went wrong. After emailing terminal output data swipes over the course of 2 weeks (and over the Thanksgiving holiday, I might add) they finally acknowledged that they were stumped:

From: 	support @ softraid.com
Subject: 	Re: help
Date: 	December 4, 2007 8:28:14 PM EST
To: 	myemail @ mac.com

Anthony;

I don't have good news. 

We still cannot find root cause behind this. Which means repairing hte
volume is kind of a guess work process. We need to find the begining of
the volume, so we can map that in the partition map.

So far we have spent several hours searching the volume and cannot
figure out either what caused this, or how to get the volume start. It
may be further down in the disk, but I am guessing, as I am not the
engineer. All I know is we cannot do it remotely.

There is still a good chance your volume can be recovered, but it would
require us to have the drives in house. Our guess is if we had the
drives in hand, we would make the data available (if possible) in 2 days
or less.

We can't guarantee recovery, though. There is an excellent chance, but
no promises. We will not charge for recovering your data, but you would
have to pay shipping costs.

I would back up the other data first. (We will work on a copy of your
disks, but it is still safer, you never know with UPS/Fed Ex) You can
erase whatever is *inside* other volumes, (for confidentiality) but do
NOT add/delete any volumes, or your stripe will become impossible to
recover.

Let me know what you want to do.

Mark James

Then they took the unprecedented step (at least in my support experience for a product that I paid once for years ago and have never had to pay an upgrade fee for) of offering to try to repair it in- house (their house) for no charge. Just ship them the drives.

Alas, it wasn’t to be.

What went wrong?

A cautionary tale

I decided to not invest the energy in all that. Don’t get me wrong — if the data was critical, it would have been worth it in spades.

But since it wasn’t critical data, I decided to cut my losses and reformat the 2 volumes to get my “Media Drive” back.

Did’ja ever?

Did you ever make a ‘yes’ decision that was really a ‘no?’ Or press the “Proceed” button exactly 0.00205508 milliseconds too soon? You know what I mean. The instant that you press the “Yes, I’m really truly sure already” button you realize that no, you really truly weren’t.

This was one of those times.

I realized the second that I pressed the ‘Proceed’ button that I had used my Media Drive as a holding area for some stuff. But what was it again?

A Cautionary Reprise

Seems simple enough.

Before you proceed to initialize your [Insert_Your_Drive_Name_Here] Drive, make sure that you have any truly required stuff on it — er — off.

Like those raw digital camera files that you hadn’t gotten around to correcting in Photoshop.

Or those media files that you were storing from a client job because they were all going to be archived to DVD reeeaal soon.

That stuff.

Honestly, it could have been much worse. When I realized what I’d lost, I realized just how lucky I was. I try to be a glass- half-full-kind-of-guy. It’s why everyone loves me.

So, I have tons of media files to copy back off of their CDs. And new media catalogs to create in iView (what’s this new Expression Media thing?) And tons and tons and tons of metadata to re- write on all of this media. If you knew how persnickety I am with this stuff (…VERY) you would know that the tagging of my digital media assets will take me a year. And what a loss it was to not think about that before I chose to…

…proceed.

At least I had it all backed up. (Sigh.)

And — oh yeah — the SoftRAID convert to/from Apple format feature seems to work now. {blows kazoo}