PCIE M.2 drive not mounting after Sonoma install

I have a 2019 Mac Pro and am also seeing this issue with a number of my internally mounted M.2 SSDs.

It has gotten to the point where I need to boot the computer then shutdown and unplug it then restart.

2019 Mac Pro, 192GB, 1TB SSD and 5700 MPX.

I am also having this issue since installing Sonoma. Most times I need to shut the computer down and unplug the box. After doing this a few times the drives appear. The drives are Samsung 970s mounted on PCI adapter cards.

There are no RAID partitions configured.

I have gone through each step mentioned in this thread and the related MacRumors thread.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-pro-2019-nvme-raid-drives-failing-to-mount.2366297/

This is absurd. They have no idea what they are doing. Forcing reinstalling the entire OS, twice, without analyzing what is going on is dumb. Replacing parts willy neely simply magic dreaming a fix and not investigating the actual issue sounds like something straight out of Idiocracy (the movie, look it up).

If you press Command-V during boot, you see the boot process in verbose mode on the screen. In my case, the system hangs initializing the GPU. That points a finger at how PCIe is being handled.

I've tried different NVME PCIe cards and all show the same issue. Once in a blue moon it boots fine and everything is there. Most of the time it boots and no drives are shown. Once in a while the entire system freezes during boot.

Can't point to a specific update where this started but when I first had the system (2019 and a couple of years after that) it all worked fine.

3cre8ive;

Deleting the SoftRAID driver in /Library/Extensions could not fix a problem where drives are not appearing to MacOS.

For one, as of 13.3, the loadable SoftRAID driver has moved to /System/Extensions. Any legacy driver in /Library/Extensions would be inert as of 13.3, it cannot load. (If you launch SoftRAID 7.6.1 or later, SoftRAID Application will delete this extension)

This cannot be the cause of the drives not showing up. You can easily prove this, as the disks for most of the users here are in Apple format, so the SoftRAID driver is not even loading. MacOS exclusively determines whether a disk shows up to MacOS, not a driver like SoftRAID.

If People with this problem look in System Report, under PCI, you will see the cards, but not the drives. That is a "hardware issue", whether triggered by a recent MacOS update or not, the drives are not being presented to MacOS at all.

To repeat, if you do not have any SoftRAID disks connected to your mac, (disks with SoftRAID partition maps), then the SoftRAID kext does not load. (Its like having a printer driver, with no corresponding printer, it does not do anything, it cannot cause any conflicts with other printers, for example.)

Not sure what was happening with your Mercury Duo. Deleting a non-loading extension was not the actual solution. (hopefully Apple had you clear the extensions cache, else just deleting it does nothing, as a copy of drivers is in the extensions cache, and will still be offered to MacOS at startup.)

As a possibility, perhaps you previously deleted the actual offending extension, but until you flushed the extensions cache, it was still loading.

One such extension I can think of would be a SMART USB driver.

Anyone who wants to assist in data collection for this issue of missing drives, we can help submit data on this to a bug report we filed.

Send an email to support at Softraid dot com.

I will tell you what we need to collect, it will be a few large files, "before" (with drives missing) and "After", when you get the drives to show again.

We are interested in what drives are triggering this, in addition, as it does not appear to be all brands. We have not seen any reports for example of Samsung drives not appearing. If anyone has Samsungs with this issue, I would like to hear from you.

thanks

macOS 14.5: no change. In fact, after finishing the update, my 2019 Mac Pro came up with only one of my Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe cards. Cold power cycle, still came up with only one of them. Immediate reboot after that came up with both.

Can't fix it or won't fix it, seems the same answer either way.

I am having issues with my OWC mercury dual raid drive as well on M1 studio. My drive was working fine, Apple replaced my logic board on my studio and after restoring from a Time Machine backup and updating to 14.3 and then reinstalling 14.3 it no longer works. It won't load the folders and crashes Finder, eventually it shows the folders on the drive however I can't get into the folders without it crashing finder.

It works on my M1 MBP which is running 14.2.1 but it is a little slow to load. I have been in contact with support and haven't been much help. The drive works fine in safe mode just not normal mode. Seems to spin up and be running all the time and crashes if I try to eject. There is a lot of people having this issue from what I can see online.

Drives have been a bit of and ongoing issue, I had to buy a new enclosure to house my raid when I bought my M1 Mac Studio as the last enclosure wouldn't mount, after purchasing the OWC and reformatting drives it was working. There was an issue with the drive constantly going to sleep and having to spin up whenever I want to access it (incompatible chipset was apples response) , tried amphetamine but not a good solution to stop it sleeping. Then the seemed to fix the issue in Ventura and drive was working fine and responsive.

I spent about 3 days trouble shooting with support to figure out my ethernet port wasn't working (which I knew), a week without my studio when they replaced logic board and now another 3 days trying to get drive to mount. They are obviously having issues with the OS and are pushing out updates without testing properly.

Support wanted me to update my MBP to 14.3 as I was having network connection issues and I refused. Why would I update to an OS which doesn't read my external drive. The constant push for you to update operating system actually makes the problem worse, and you cant easily downgrade OS.

Come on Apple, fix your issues!

I waited to install Sonoma in attempts to avoid compatibility issues. Just installed 14.3 and am consistently not seeing my drives that are on a Sonnet card. I restart a few times and they have reappeared and work fine.

To make things a little more confusing, I DID have this problem a couple of times on Ventura. Sonoma is worse, but this issue may have started earlier. I'm running a MacPro with three Samsung 2GB NVMe drives on a Sonnet card.

I'm on a 2021 MP 16-Core...3 Samsung EVOs on my Sonnet card. Disks didn't mount a couple times in Ventura. Restarted and it was fine.

Then, I updated to Sonoma and all three NVMe drives would disappear/not mount. Called AppleCare and they had me reinstall Sonoma, twice.

That made it worse. Much worse.

After the second OS install, the computer wouldn't even start. When I unplugged it and plugged it back in, the progress bar would get 15% though before the computer shut off.

Trying to start in safe mode or recovery mode didn't work either.

Dropped it off at Apple Store. Waited on parts for 2 weeks. They replaced the power supply, main system drive, and Logic Board! So it's basically a new computer (with my original Samsung NVMe drives on the Sonnet).

So far, I've done 14 of the probable 40-50 hours of reinstalling, authorizing, contacting companies for serial numbers and authorizations, upgrading, setting up templates, etc. Hundreds of audio plugins and applications, installers...plus any other programs that were on the system drive.

I am losing at least four weeks of work.

I saw on this thread that Sonnet contacted Apple about this back in January. Are there any updates on progress? Has Apple responded to the Sonnet folks?

I went to Feedback - Mac Pro - Apple and submitted my "Bug Report" for this issue. It neither gave me a ticket nor emailed me one, but at least my report is in. I encourage others to do the same and reference the bug report FB13560165 submitted by Sonnet.

Amoniak wrote:

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 don't think so. It works once in a while when you reboot. They issue will come back.

Unable so far to reproduce this with macOS 14.4. Also observing that the SoftRAID driver has updated to 8.0 (the app is still at 7.6.1).

Mac Pro 2019, 2x Sonnet FUS-SSD-4X4-E3, 8x Samsung 970 PRO

Just reproduced it with macOS 14.4.1.

(Although in all fairness, I didn't expect it to be fixed given the 14.4.1 release notes and discussions.)

2019 Mac Pro, same issue. had machine checked by Apple, all good. All since Sonoma update. I've even bought a new card thinking it was that, but the same issue. Sometimes only mounts 2 of my 4 SSDs. Anybody with any fixes?

+1

4 years running 4 x NVME sticks (RAID 0) with no issues. Now (after Sonoma), they show up only after several power cycles. No rhyme or reason as to the number of power cycles. Once they come up upon boot, they work fine for the duration. Went through everything under the sun trying to solve it until I found this thread and realized I'm not on my own. (RaidCP is a spinner used for backup)