R4 Mount Problem

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  • Last Post 23 March 2023
  • Topic Is Solved
Benjamin Roach posted this 04 June 2019

G'day folks,

I realise this is an EOL product, however given how many other folks i've found online having issues, I was hoping to create a thread that others could turn to online to troubleshoot their Pegasus products and perhaps recover their data.

My issue was sudden - I turned my Mac on today and it simply wouldn't mount, giving me the dire "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" message. At this point i've tried the following:

  • resetting my main workstation iMac and the Pegasus (same result)
  • trying different Thunderbolt ports on both my iMac & Pegasus (same result)
  • trying a different Mac (same OS version and same result)
  • upgrading the firmware (same result)

It's worth nothing that my Promise Utility works perfectly, reports perfect health since April, and I can see/access all information using Promise Utility about my R4 unit. I get a blue light on the front, shows up in system info, no warnings on Promise Utility - it just simply won't mount on what feels like an out of the blue situation.

I've opened up a case with Promise and spoke to their team briefly (and shout-out to their awesome support already) but thought since the product is no longer supported that perhaps the community might be a better place to turn to.

 

 

At present, I have two macs running Mac OS Mojave (10.14.5)

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Eelko Ferwerda posted this 23 March 2023

This how far i came as wel. 

shut of pegasus and mac. Take out thunderbolt wire.
Start Mac then start up Pegasus

Once they are both fully started up, make the thunderbolt connection between both and wait for a miracle. 

I think this is just because the latest firmware can't be installed (in my case)
https://forum.promise.com/thread/pegasusr4-is-not-working-under-ventura-13-2-1-apple-macstudio-m1-max/

Benjamin Roach posted this 01 July 2019

As a final update - I gave up and bought a Lacie RAID and threw this in the trash. Promise support just wasn't up to scratch for me.

Benjamin Roach posted this 06 June 2019

Another follow up for the day: I was unable to use DiskWarrior to repair the volume as it believes the partition table is missing/corrupt. 

To recap, no hardware or software changes were made before/after the drive stopped working. I've tried everything under the sun from NVRAM resets, different machines, trying to repair the volume, firmware updates under the advisal of promise and everything via Promise Utility has reported no faults and 100% green lights.

To be quite clear, i've narrowed it down to this: something on Promise's software end is not allowing my drive to mount, which also means that there's a good chance hundreds if not thousands of other Pegasus users may be prone to the same bug. In the interim, i've started the arduous task of going around Promise's software and using EaseUS Data Recover to pull the data (which is 100% intact and functioning fine) off the raid. Only 166 more hours to go...

FYI: if Promise support are able to provide me a fix to get easy access to my data again, i'd run out tomorrow and grab myself a Pegasus2 tomorrow, but as it stands i'm super burnt by this ordeal, it's already cost me 2.5 days in trying to run around and find a solution that isn't just "oh well, sorry."

Benjamin Roach posted this 06 June 2019

Just to update for those looking for answers, I received a ticket back from their support team stating it was an issue with Mac OS 10.14 which doesn't make sense as it was setup and running without errors for several months on Mac OS 10.14 prior to this mounting issue.

100% narrowed down to a software issue at this point on Promise's end as there's been no other factor that has changed. At this stage i'd recommend anyone looking at a second hand or near EOL Promise solution to avoid their products at all costs - this is not a slight on their company at all or their customer service so far, rather, as a data solution, if their software is too unreliable that it corrupts data without reason that you just can't risk it.

Benjamin Roach posted this 05 June 2019

You can review our EOSL page where the Pegasus1 is part of the EOSL list:

I appreciate that, and have read that - surely you can appreciate the difference between "use this product but it's unsupported" compared to "will definitely fail without warning." By comparison, I don't expect my Ford's brakes to fail just because it's out of warranty, and if there was to be such an integral, consistent and expected failure i'm sure Ford would be pulling out all the stops to ensure folks are no longer driving their cars. Same with this - don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the support so far on an EOL product, however as i've previously mentioned it seems a lot of other users are experiencing similar issues with random data corruption with no real reason why, and I 100% wouldn't be using it at all had I known EOSL meant "there's a precedent your data will be lost without a real reason why."

Just to update, i've completed the latest redundancy check and it seems to have found no issues (i've uploaded the file to my Dropbox here to avoid thread spam) - are there any options to force a table rebuild for example? I've run some basic recovery software and from my initial impression all the data is there.

P B posted this 05 June 2019

Food for thought, if my issue is unsolveable, based on the precedent should Promise put out a warning about using "legacy" products on anything beyond Mac OS 10.10?

You can review our EOSL page where the Pegasus1 is part of the EOSL list:

https://www.promise.com/us/Support/warranty/EOSL

I've checked your issue, the LD is currently running a redudancy check; moreover, media patrol is paused:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BGA Progress
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Redundancy Check Progress:
===============================================================================
LdId State       Percentage
===============================================================================
0    Running     7         

Media Patrol Progress:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
State: Paused                          OverallPercentage: 2
CurrentPdId: 1                         CurrentPdPercentage: 10
NumberOfPdCompleted: 0                 NumberOfPdQueued: 3
CompletedPdIds:  
QueuedPdIds:  2 3 4

What is the current status of the redudancy check?

rc

Redundancy Check is a routine maintenance procedure for fault-tolerant disk arrays that ensures all of the user data is protected correctly by checking data consistency for both parity and mirrored data, while checking the media integrity as well. RC operates on a logical drive basis, and it only works for redundant RAID configurations, which does not include RAID 0. When encountering an error, the user has the choice of repairing the consistency or media error, or just reporting the error without repairing it. It is recommended that an RC is performed on a regular scheduled basis.

Benjamin Roach posted this 05 June 2019

@ Bejamin Roach

Forum Rules: Please do not post 1000s of lines on forum postings.

Please document your issue via https://support.promise.com or call (408) 228-1500.

Apologies for posting too much information, I thought it'd be fine as I saw other users do in other posts with similar problems. As I mentioned, i've opened up a case number but like many others it's tough to resolve issues when the solutions are hidden on the support ticket system, hence why i've done both. I'd really like to keep this open so that if I find a solution others will have open access to it (which is great for you folks as it'll reduce the amount of legacy support tickets you're getting.)

Food for thought, if my issue is unsolveable, based on the precedent should Promise put out a warning about using "legacy" products on anything beyond Mac OS 10.10? If sporadic, unpredictable total data loss is common then it would be prudent to really alert to how buggy legacy products have become.

 

P B posted this 05 June 2019

@ Bejamin Roach

Forum Rules: Please do not post 1000s of lines on forum postings.

Please document your issue via https://support.promise.com or call (408) 228-1500.

You can attach a service report to your case and a technical support representative will review your logs and provide the appropriate solution.

Benjamin Roach posted this 04 June 2019

I thought i'd pop in my subsystem info on a seperate comment so those looking for solutions can simply scroll past this post.

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