Mojave on RAID with APFS - a HOWTO

Increasingly discouraged with it.
I did Raid 0 for more space and performance, and Apple instead of helping, worsens our lives more and more.
Will I have to spend the rest of my life at MacOS Sierra?

 

So you need to do this boot to single user mode and move bootcaches.plist just once and afterwards Mojave boots without hickups from APFS RAID 0? Or do you have to select the boot partitions at each reboot via startup manager aka booting with the option key pressed?

I do not have access to the startup manager as I have a Radeon RX 580 in my Mac Pro, which doesn't show the boot screen. Switching temporarily to an older card with boot screen during the installation would be feasible but a solution where I need the bootscreen for every reboot would not work for my setup. In that case I'd have to stick with HFS+ for my RAID0 system volume.

 

[QUOTE="toru173, [/QUOTE]

Hey guys 1st post. I'm not nearly as technical as most of you. My Raid0 setup does not appear to be the same as the step by step instructions. At this point I am on the fence between just forgetting about Mojave or just purchasing a 1 TB drive and starting over, doing away with the raid0 I have. Here is what my disk utility looks like. If I just format what I have and reinstall everything, would I have the option to just not set my drives up as a raid?

If it matters, mine is a Mid 12 Macbook pro with the 16gb memory upgrade and the disk space you see.

 

I apologize for lack of clarity. The computer works great in Sierra and boots fine for that. I am just frustrated with wanting to update to Mojave and do not have the technical skill. In my mind, I wondered if I would be better off just ditching my 2 500gb drives set as raid0 and get a single 1tb drive, or just scrub it all together and stay with Sierra. Below is what you asked for. I greatly appreciate the effort.

 

Installed Mojave 10.14.2 on APFS RAID 0 and encountered the problems described in this post and was able to overcome them. Let me try to pass on what I learned.

Code:

gpt create /dev/disk9
gpt add -b 40 -s 409600 -i 1 -t efi /dev/disk9
gpt show /dev/disk9
       start        size  index  contents
           0           1         PMBR
           1           1         Pri GPT header
           2          32         Pri GPT table
          34           6
          40      409600      1  GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
      409640  1997375415
  1997785055          32         Sec GPT table
  1997785087           1         Sec GPT header

On the second gpt add command make sure to use -b 409640 not 409600 or you'll get an error message "not enough space left on device". Use the second number listed (in my case 1997375415) to as your -s parameter to add the remaining free space.

Code:

gpt add -b 409640 -s 1997375415 -i 2 -t apfs /dev/disk9

Once you get this far you should be able to run the Mojave installer, select the RAID volume, get all the way through without hitting the preboot error. It will then reboot, install a bunch more, and then you'll get all the way almost to the end and it will error out with:

To anyone who gets this far, yes, this can be done from the installer. Once the error message dialog appears asking you to reboot, you can access the menubar along the top right (country code and keyboard). Once you've accessed the top menubar you'll need to mount the volume read/write. This can be done from the command line (somehow) but I did it by selecting Utilities => Disk Utility selecting the drive that represented the RAID set, clicked mount. Once the volume is mounted Quit Disk Utility.

Next go to back to the top menu bar => Utilities => Terminal.

Code:

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ RAID/usr/standalone/
mv bootcaches.plist bootcaches.plist.bak

No pesky SIP in the Mojave installer thankfully.

Quit Terminal

You'll be taken back to the error screen, offering for you to reboot, do so, you should then reboot into the Mojave setup screen!

 

Thank you for your post I wouldn't have been able to get through the install without it! Synthetic write performance is somewhat understandably degraded ~3,400MB/s write performance compared to ~4,000MB/s but the read performance is about the same at ~4,000MB/s on my 4x SM951 RAID 0. I got ~400MB/s sustained from the installer importing from my files from a PCIe SSD to the RAID 0.

 

Thanks for this.

 

Hello everyone,

this is my first post. So at first thank you very much for all these insights to APFS RAID with macOS mojave.

Unfortunately I can't proceed the described process successfully and I don't really know what am I doing wrong or what am I missing.

I have a MacBook Pro 15" non Retina from 2012. I've replaced the HDD and the DVD with 2 480GB SSDs from Crucial. So far so good. (even if these are not the best SSDs in performance)

Every time I try to install macOS Mojave 10.14.2 on the APFS RAID0 I come to the point with the "bless" message. So I move bootcaches.plist to bootcaches.bkp before rebooting. But then If I reboot I can't boot from the "Macintosh RAID" disk.

Do I have to remove the USB Stick before reboot? Do I have to choose Macintosh RAID from boot manager manually? I've tried but then I've got the blue "Questionmark" symbol.

I've done all the steps as mentioned from @toru173 in post #19 except the last step belonging to the bootcaches.plist. This I've done like @jscipione described it in post #33 (change it before reboot from the installer).

Has anyone the same issue or can anyone imagine what went wrong?

[EDIT]: Finally I did it! But I don't really know why! It's definitely the last step. Maybe I tried it at the wrong volume or path? I first tried it in single mode but there I can't rename the file because it was not permitted, then again booting with mojave installer and changed it via Terminal.

Kind regards
Michael

 

Hi,

I tried and tried and I'm stuck. I have a MacPro 5,1 and I made a RAID out of my two SSDs. If I try to format the RAID in APFS, I can start the install. But it fails with a "can't create a preboot volume for APFS install" in the initial phase of the install. Predictably, I can't see the drive to proceed to the other step. If I try to format in HFS following the instructions, the RAID is greyed out, and the installer says that the RAID is not formatted in HFS+ or APFS, even though it's formatted in HFS+.

Any ideas ou there? Thank you for all your help.

 

Does anyone tried to activate FileVault in combination with bootable APFS RAID0?

Every time after I activate FileVault in macOS mojave 10.14.2 I'm not able to boot from the drive anymore.

I also tried to format the drive before installing mojave but same result.

[EDIT] I also tried it with HFS+ RAID0 and encryption but it also failed. After searching for some time for a solution on the web it reaches out that's not possible to combine software based RAID with FileVault encryption. Any other experience?

 

I installed 10.14.2 successfully by using these steps, but it seems it doesn't work with 10.14.3.

The last time I did this. After renaming the bootcaches.plist file, all went well. But this time, it’s stuck at “The installer resources were not found.”

Any idea?

 

Hi,

I finally had some time to try it again and it worked. My guess is I was inattentive to some of the steps I needed to do.
Some lessons for the less technically inclined like me:

- Be sure to follow jscipione's advice and use the correct size for your drive. I was far into the transfer of all my files before I noticed something was wrong.
- If you need to destroy the raid, use the gpt destroy command to delete the partitions first. I got nowhere with diskutil.
- If you're on a GPU upgraded 5,1 like me, it works fine. It's only the Mojave install process that doesn't work. Mojave boots fine on a non-Metal graphics card, so you don't have to swap between your old and new cards like a madman each step of the way.

Thanks toru and everyone else!

 

What version of macOS do you use?

 

I'm on 10.14.3

 

So confused by this. Have a Thunder2 Quad external case and was hoping to put 2 TB SSDs in it as a bootable RAID 0 volume on Mojave. Is there anywhere where this is spelled out in a single post? I can't piece it together myself from this thread.

 

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!
IT WORKS!!!!