Waiting for root device

Mac only – Legacy reference for users starting up from a SoftRAID volume

Note: This FAQ applies to SoftRAID 5.x only. Since macOS Big Sur (11.0), SoftRAID volumes are no longer bootable.

What is happening

When you start up a Mac from a SoftRAID or AppleRAID volume, the early part of the startup process loads the kernel and drivers from a helper partition associated with that volume. Once those have loaded, the system then mounts the startup volume itself.

If the system is unable to mount the startup volume, it displays “Waiting for root device” on screen and stalls. If you are not using verbose boot mode, you will not see this message – instead your Mac will appear to hang on a grey screen.

Why this happens

When you upgrade macOS on a SoftRAID startup volume, the macOS installer installs a new copy of the SoftRAID driver – but this copy does not include the SoftRAID Monitor or SoftRAID daemon. However, your startup volume still contains the launch files that tell macOS to start these two background tasks. Since the files they reference no longer exist, macOS writes an error to the system log each time it tries to start them:

com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[149] (com.softraid.SoftRAID_Monitor[235]): posix_spawn("/System/Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext/Contents/Resources/SoftRAID_Monitor.app/Contents/MacOS/SoftRAID_Monitor", ...): No such file or directory

Solution

You have two options:

Option 1 (Recommended): Install the latest version of SoftRAID. This will reinstall the SoftRAID driver, SoftRAID Monitor, and SoftRAID daemon correctly.

Option 2: Manually delete the two launch files that are causing the error. They are located at:

• /Library/LaunchAgents/com.softraid.SoftRAID_Monitor.plist
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.softraid.softraidd