PCIE M.2 drive not mounting after Sonoma install

Hi, I thought I'd add my experience of this issue. MY Sonnet card doesnt show up in my 2019 Mac Pro either since the first Sonoma install. I'm now on 14.4.1 and it still doesn't show up. The Sonnet card has four Samsung nvME's installed, and worked perfectly before Sonoma.

I also have the OWC accelsior M4 card installed, with four WD NVME's installed, and that one shows up every time with Sonoma.

I've been in touch with Sonnet who are aware, and were disappinted that Apple didnt fix the issue in the 14.4.1 update.

Tony

For the record, I have the issue with both cards. This is not unique to Sonnet.

Tonse wrote:

Hi, I thought I'd add my experience of this issue. MY Sonnet card doesnt show up in my 2019 Mac Pro either since the first Sonoma install. I'm now on 14.4.1 and it still doesn't show up. The Sonnet card has four Samsung nvME's installed, and worked perfectly before Sonoma.

I also have the OWC accelsior M4 card installed, with four WD NVME's installed, and that one shows up every time with Sonoma.

I've been in touch with Sonnet who are aware, and were disappinted that Apple didnt fix the issue in the 14.4.1 update.

Tony

OK, given I just "downgraded" (upgraded?) from Sonoma to Ventura, I can provide some pointers, but if you screw up your machine it's not my fault.

IMPORTANT: THIS WILL WIPE ALL DATA!!! Make sure you have a backup.

0) Backup your data. Maybe do this twice. I was able to find a Time Machine backup from before Sonoma was installed, but it should theoretically work if you have a Time Machine backup taken after Sonoma was installed. The way you will reinstall your files and apps is using Migration Assistant to read your Time Machine backup off an external drive (because Time Machine no longer backs up the OS, like it used to, or a full image backup would). Put your Time Machine Backup on an external drive.

1) You also need a bootable disk containing Ventura. Download Ventura from the App Store using this link. Despite your mac telling you it cannot install Ventura, the downloaded file you require will be put into your Applications folder: How to download and install macOS - Apple Support

2) Grab a USB drive with at least 16GB and follow these instructions to create the bootable Ventura installer using the file in your Applications folder: Create a bootable installer - Apple Support. The terminal command you need is something like: sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Ventura.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume

3) You need to enable the ability to boot from an external drive, using Recovery Mode to do this. Follow these instructions: About Startup Security Utility on a Mac with the Apple T2 Security Chip - Apple Support

4) Shutdown your Mac and remove all external drives except the bootable Ventura USB drive.

5) Restart and immediately hold down the OPTION key until Startup Manager appears. Choose your USB drive.

6) Choose Disk Utility -> View -> View ALL attached Drives. Choose the upper-most drive (not the indented volumes below). It's normally called Apple Media, Mac SSD, or similar. Erase this drive and format as APFS with a GUID Partition Map. If you use Bootcamp, leave that partition alone. I was able to leave my Bootcamp install untouched and it works just as it always did after installing Ventura.

7) Once your main Mac drive is wiped, exit Drive Utility and go back to the menu, then choose Install MacOS.

8) Start the installation of Ventura and follow prompts, but don't create an account (as in, don't enter any user details). If you enter new user details, you may end up with permission problems after restoring with Migration Assistant, even if it's the same username you used previously.

9) Open Migration Assistant when provided the option, select the Time Machine backup you saved to an external drive after plugging it in, start the restore process.

10) Migration Assistant seems to do a good job of restoring preferences, passwords, etc. It's honestly not that much of a headache to get everything going again after Migration Assistant completes.

Good luck and I take no responsibility for the above instructions.

On my MacPro 2019 running Sonoma, I tried an SMC restart and my drives reappeared. Don't know if this is just luck or a thing and don't know if they will continue to mount when I shut down ..

Reset the SMC of your Mac - Apple Support

***FIX*** not ideal but gets the drive back.

I removed my raid from spotlight as I had noticed a lot of read activity which fixed the issue. I also noticed that Time Machine was getting stuck backing up the drive so removed the drive from Time Machine too and my OWC mercury elite pro dual (as a hard raid) now works as it should.

My guess is a software issue between spotlight and/or Time Machine

Tonse wrote:

A potentially positive update, as both my Sonnet card and my OWC card have stayed mounted on the desktop for the past three days, including through 6 restarts. Here's what I did:

I updated to the latest version of SoftRaid ( v 8.0). The Sonnet m4 raid showed up in that, though showed as "Unmounted" and would not "Mount" at all. I initialized all four nvmes on the Sonnet card using SoftRaid.

Then went back to Apple Disc Utility and the four formatted drives all showed up, so I used Disk Utility to build a new 4 disc array, and since then the Sonnet card has worked.

I'll update any changes, fingers crossed this may work for others.

Tony

I don't use SoftRaid and have the issue. Certainly not an issue caused by SoftRaid.

Whenever my PCIe mounted M.2 SSDs fail to mount on my 2019 MacPro I execute a PRAM reset and then boot into recovery mode. The drives are then accessible in Disk Utility where I run First Aid. Whether this helps or not I don't know but I can then restart and the drives mount and behave perfectly.

Slightly strange behaviour though as the usual PRAM reset key combination doesn't work, but holding down the recovery key combination seems to do the job after which the Mac boots into recovery mode.

Having completed this procedure I have shut down the Mac overnight and the drives have successfully mounted the following day. Do this a second time and they don't mount so I go through the first procedure again.

Lately though, I have been just leaving the Mac on 24/7.

Because this is workable for me I haven't yet tried my other idea of reformatting the drives with Sonomas Disk Utility.

There are other issues in Somona for me, including a strange audio feedback loop in Apple Music that seems to be linked to the new Mic mode, which must be active to record into Logic Pro using any audio interface.

Hope this is useful.

I have a Sonnet M.2 8x4 loaded with 8x 4TB Samsung 990 Pro drives. Sometimes the Mac Pro boots up and those drives are missing. If I reboot a few times they come back. This does not happen with my other card, an OWC Accelsior 8M2 loaded with 4x 2TB Samsung 980 Pros and 4x 2TB Gigabyte Aorus Gen 4s.

All my problems are specifically with the Sonnet card under MacOS Sonoma. It worked fine before under Ventura and Monterey.

Hi, My internal SSD 8T didn't mount after installing Sonoma. What I did : I opened the MacPro 2019 and I unplugged the OWC SoftRaid 8 Tera, and replugged it (and I cleaned all the dust inside...). That's it! And it mounted again. Problem solved. Thank you.

I can fairly reliably get the drives to mount by booting in to safe mode, then restarting as normal No idea why ?

Exact same problem! Everything was fine on Ventura with 2019 Mac Pro. Now after a (forced) Sonoma 'upgrade', often random NVME M.2 drives installed on my 2 Sonnet 4x4 M.2 PCIe cards will not mount after booting. Nothing else has changed. It's like the lottery whether after booting, a drive is just missing and not showing in Disk Utility. If the drive shows up later, the RAID array works fine. It's not a disk or driver issue, it's Sonoma 100%. Please fix this Apple!

This just happened to me after I upgraded to Sonoma yesterday, I have 2 x Sonnet M.2 8x4 Silent Gen4 PCIe Cards. After restarting about 8 times they both showed up, I also turned off all background apps and any login at start up apps. Not sure if that was the trick but I will leave my system on until this gets figured out. I emailed Sonnet support hopefully they will have some solutions.

I dont use SoftRaid either, I only installed it to test the cards. Initialising the nvme's with SoftRaid, prior to building the RAID in DU seems to have given a positive result. For now at least.