<< Solved >> Opencore stuck at black screen before picker with AppleRAID

[kevinluk07]

Hi there, I've been using AppleRAID on two HDD as RAID 0 in Mojave with Clover with no problems. And now that I have a new boot SSD with OpenCore on Big Sur, the OpenCore picker won't appear unless I boot without one (and one specific) RAID member disk.

The last lines that OpenCore stuck at is:

04:200 00:009 OCB: Adding bless entry on disk - PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x17,0x0)/Sata(0x4,0xFFFF,0x0)/HD(2,GPT,F15D6A73-2C65-4B41-B19B-A924DD19B479,0x64028,0x15D466360)
04:211 00:010 OCBP: BlessedFileHEX (1/2 80) - 02 01 0C 00 D0 41 03 0A 00 00 00 00 01 01 06 00 00 17 03 12 0A 00 04 00 FF FF 00 00 04 01 2A 00 02 00 00 00 28 40 06 00 00 00 00 00 60 63 46 5D 01 00 00 00 73 6A 5D F1 65 2C 41 4B B1 9B A9 24
04:222 00:010 OCBP: BlessedFileHEX (2/2 80) - DD 19 B4 79 02 02 04 04 06 00 00 00 7F FF 04 00
04:232 00:010 OCBP: BlessedFileDP - PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x17,0x0)/Sata(0x4,0xFFFF,0x0)/HD(2,GPT,F15D6A73-2C65-4B41-B19B-A924DD19B479,0x64028,0x15D466360)/
04:243 00:010 OCBP: Blessed file is valid
04:254 00:010 OCB: Adding entry type (T:1|F:0|G:0) - PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x17,0x0)/Sata(0x4,0xFFFF,0x0)/HD(2,GPT,F15D6A73-2C65-4B41-B19B-A924DD19B479,0x64028,0x15D466360)/
04:264 00:010 OCB: Trying to get label from \.contentDetails

When I tried to get some info of the disk with diskutil, I notice that Bootable is set to true:

diskutil info -plist F15D6A73-2C65-4B41-B19B-A924DD19B479
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>AESHardware</key>
<false/>
<key>Bootable</key>
<true/>
<key>BooterDeviceIdentifier</key>
<string>disk7s3</string>
...

I've gone into GParted and only the first partition has the boot flag, which has no effect even in the diskutil info plist output.

Also the RAID set works absolutely fine if the problematic disk is plugged after the OS is loaded.

There are indeed a EFI partition on each of the RAID member, which has one file EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE/IM181.fd (I tried renaming the EFI folder but no effect) also an Apple_Boot type Boot OS X partition at the end of the disk which is empty (except some spotlight generated files).

I'm sure this would be a fix. I could erase and reformat my RAID but I feel like it might not fix the issue.

Thanks!

 

[kevinluk07]

Problem solved!

I swear I read the OpenCore scan policy three times yesterday, but I never noticed that mine was set to 0 instead of the default value in the documentation. Putting it back to the default, now OpenCore only scans AFPS which is enough in my case.

And after messing around in Gparted, I have to put back the correct AppleRAID GUID to the partition, for some reason it was set to Linux Filesystem.

 

[deeveedee]

@kevinluk07 Your Apple RAID solution sounds interesting. I haven't installed macOS on "Apple RAID" before. Am I correct in my understanding that this is a "Software" RAID 0 solution that you specify with Disk Utility prior to installing macOS? Once you had the Apple RAID configured with Disk Utility, was the installation of macOS any different from installing on a single disk? Thanks!

 

[kevinluk07]

@kevinluk07 Your Apple RAID solution sounds interesting. I haven't installed macOS on "Apple RAID" before. Am I correct in my understanding that this is a "Software" RAID 0 solution that you specify with Disk Utility prior to installing macOS? Once you had the Apple RAID configured with Disk Utility, was the installation of macOS any different from installing on a single disk? Thanks!

Hi there! It was a Apple RAID for data only, there's no OS on it and I never attempt to boot from it. From what I heard it is difficult to install OS on an Apple RAID.

But yes, it is a software RAID 0, which I have created in Disk Utility in Mojave before I install Big Sur on a separate, single SSD.

So sorry, I don't have any experience in installing OS on Apple RAID.