Mounting Mac OS X RAID at mountpoint on startup?

Question

I typically use the following in /etc/fstab to get volumes to mount in standard places on the Mac (these mimic our setup on other OSes for local volumes):

UUID=655DCDDB-15BA-37BF-A7F8-EB3D57C610F5 /local hfs rw
UUID=52B32A78-4AE6-3338-ADF7-B2284A7A89F1 /local/scratch hfs rw

On one machine (a Mac Pro running 10.5.7) I striped the scratch partition for performance, but now it won't mount on startup any more.

Is this just a bug/missing feature or am I doing something wrong? If the former, any workarounds that do not involve hard-coding the device node would be appreciated.

diskutil info output is the following, if it's helpful:

   Device Identifier:        disk4
   Device Node:              /dev/disk4
   Part Of Whole:            disk4
   Device / Media Name:      

   Volume Name:              scratch
   Mount Point:              /local/scratch
   File System:              Journaled HFS+
                             Journal size 40960 KB at offset 0xe8b000
   Owners:                   Enabled

   Partition Type:           Apple_HFS
   Bootable:                 Is bootable
   Media Type:               
   Protocol:                 
   Volume UUID:              52B32A78-4AE6-3338-ADF7-B2284A7A89F1

   Total Size:               465.0 Gi (499312033792 B) (975218816 512-byte blocks)
   Free Space:               455.1 Gi (488632147968 B) (954359664 512-byte blocks)

   Read Only:                No
   Ejectable:                No
   Whole:                    Yes
   Internal:                 No
   OS 9 Drivers:             No
   Low Level Format:         Not Supported

   This disk is a RAID Set.  RAID Set Information:
      Set Name:          scratchy
      RAID Set UUID:     1C8FBA63-A780-4576-82D6-1AF4F2CE5266
      Level Type:        Stripe
      Status:            Online
      Chunk Size:        32768

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 01 '09 at 22:14

Just discovered one workaround: diskutil will let you mount a RAID set via its UUID (but if you put this UUID in /etc/fstab, it does not work). I made this work on startup by putting the following in /Library/LaunchAgents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>KeepAlive</key>
        <false/>
        <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true/>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>mount-striped-scratch</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/usr/sbin/diskutil</string>
                <string>mount</string>
                <string>1C8FBA63-A780-4576-82D6-1AF4F2CE5266</string>
        </array>
</dict>
</plist>

Mounting Mac OS X RAID at mountpoint on startup?

1 Answers1