#35 Mac Pro and striped S/W RAID -- no rEFIt menu
I just converted from a regular boot volume to an OS X software RAID striped volume -- now I cannot get a rEFIt menu. Here's the sequence of events:
Initial configuration:
WD 1TB in Bay 1 (Primary bootable system drive)
Seagate 1TB in Bay 2 (formatted and empty)
Empty Bay 3
Seagate 320GB in Bay 3 (backup boot drive for emergencies, disc copies, etc.)
Step 1:
Boot to 320GB drive (bay 4)
Using Carbon Copy Cloner, duplicate the WD 1TB in Bay 1 to the Seagate 1TB in Bay 2.
Boot and verify that everything works -- including rEFIt.
Step 2:
Open case, move Seagate 1TB to bay 3 and install second WD 1TB in Bay 2.
Step 3:
Boot to 320GB drive and create RAID stripe array using the pair of WD 1TB drives (Bay 1 & 2).
Copy system volume from Seagate (in Bay 3) to 1TB RAID array.
Step 4:
Boot.
rEFIt menu appears, but has two entries labeled "Boot OSX" in addition to the entry for the Seagate 1TB and 320GB drives. Selecting either one of them causes the system to boot on the RAID array.
Now, this is where I should have stopped and said good-enough. But I didn't.
Step 5:
Reinstall rEFIt on the RAID array.
And that's where things went horribly wrong. I have not been able to get a rEFIt menu since then. I've tried manually running enable.sh and enable-always.sh. No errors -- but no menu, either. I wiped rEFIt from all three drives and reinstalled it first to the RAID array. That did not result in a menu at boot time. Then I installed it to the 320GB drive. That didn't resolve the problem, either.
At this point, I'm perplexed. Have others with Mac OS X S/W RAID striping arrays successfully installed rEFIt? Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
Similar problem here.
I have a 250GB drive with Ubuntu 9.04, and a pair of 500GB drives in a striped RAID with MacOS 10.5.7. (Both are clean installs - I just got this machine today.) I installed REFIT on the RAID volume, and the installation seemed to succeed, but the REFIT menu never appears - I just boot straight into MacOS.
Work-around: boot with OPTION held down. I see two Mac disks, and one Windows disk. The Windows disk is actually Linux, and I am able to boot it.
@Mbaranczak:
Thanks for your comment and confirmation that this problem was not unique to my installation of rEFIt.
Of course, your workaround is what the Mac provides without rEFIt installed. I removed rEFIt as I was uncomfortable having a broken piece of software that was supposed to run at boot time. Like you, I use the Option button now.
There seems to be no way to run rEFIt from a RAID volume. I finally got it working by creating another HFS+ partition, and installing rEFIt on that. (This is something I had to do anyway to get around an unrelated problem: Linux can't mount the RAID, and MacOS can't mount the Linux partition. And I needed some place where I could share data between the two.)
Here's what I did, in case anybody's interested:
1. Use GParted to shrink the Linux root partition.
2. Create a HFS+ partition in the resulting empty space. I first tried this with GParted, but MacOS wouldn't recognize it, so I did it again with Disk Utility.
3. Once MacOS mounts the new partition, copy /efi there.
4. Run enable-always.sh from the new efi directory.
5. Somewhere along the line, I screwed up the Linux bootloader, but I was able to fix it by following the instructions here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351
The RAID is showing up in the rEFIt menu as two separate Mac volumes, but other than that, everything seems to work fine.