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Vintage Mac RAID, missing drives

Five year old desktop Mac with three drives. Every two years the Apple RAID card requires a new battery. The Genius kicked me out, saying they don't work on vintage Macs. A new battery was installed by a Mac certified repairman but now we can no longer see drive 2 or 3, the RAID array where all my files live. The OS mounts, disk 1 which uses a JBOD RAID driver despite having no need for a second drive (one can't install Mac OS on a RAID-ed drive).


As the drives in question can no longer mount or be seen by Disk Utility or Apple RAID Utility, etc. how should I proceed to find andrebuild these drives?

2 x 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Posted on Aug 25, 2015 5:28 PM

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Posted on Aug 25, 2015 5:50 PM

Has the Mac Pro in question been transported around the countryside in a bouncy vehicle? perhaps the drives have become dislodged from their backplane connectors.


Are the drives spinning up? The side door is not interlocked, and placing a hand on a drive will let you know whether it is spinning up or not. Be careful, components (including the drives themselves) can be "burn-your-hand" hot.

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Aug 25, 2015 5:50 PM in response to John Dwight

Has the Mac Pro in question been transported around the countryside in a bouncy vehicle? perhaps the drives have become dislodged from their backplane connectors.


Are the drives spinning up? The side door is not interlocked, and placing a hand on a drive will let you know whether it is spinning up or not. Be careful, components (including the drives themselves) can be "burn-your-hand" hot.

Aug 26, 2015 8:30 AM in response to John Dwight

Thanks, Grant. We checked all the connectors. This produced the appearance of Drive 1, the boot disk OS. we'd also suspected shock as loosening the cables but still no drive 2 or 3. I can't really hear or feel activity on these drives either. I have a technician on the case but we both agreed checking the Apple Board would be good. Thank you!

Aug 26, 2015 8:51 AM in response to John Dwight

When you look casually at the drive to motherboard connection, it appears that the SATA connectors are mounted on the motherboard. That turns out to be an illusion. The SATA connectors are on a wiring harness that snakes its way behind the motherboard.


Your processor specs could apply to either a 2008 or a 2012 model Mac Pro silver tower. The two use different models of the RAID card.


On the older model, the card is connected with an iPass cable. If that is your model, you should be certain that cable is properly seated, and the cable/socket on the motherboard must be appropriately stowed as well.


On the newer model, the card picks up some extra signals provided only in the top PCI-e slot. So proper seating of the card in its slot is essential, and no other slot can be used for the card.

Vintage Mac RAID, missing drives

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