Cannot boot Mac Mini with striped RAID 0 set Today we could not get one of our machines running with 10.9 and RAID 0 which stripes the data on the boot volume.

After several hours of doing the 'standard' tasks like fixing permissions etc, we've hit a dead end for troubleshooting.

Here's what's going on:

Machine starts, we can see the apple logo and the spinning wheel / activity indicator animation. Nothing else happens.

Running safe boot mode ends in the same state.

So I have tried running verbose, the last line is:

Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-226.1.1)


If I do a hard shutdown and start the verbose mode again, I can see in logs (last lines)

Executing fsck_hfs...
hfs: Removed 0 orphaned / unlinked files and 4 directories


I have started the system in single user mode.
I ran the fsck on it, it worked just as expected:

fsck -fyd 


I've retried it twice before I got a note saying that file system is ok.

Reboot: same issue.

I can access all of the files and stuff on the raid when in single user mode, but there's no way the system will boot.

I woud love to hear some opinions, please limit the answers/comments to system tools or free tools available on the internet.
Also, there's no way I'm going to remove the drives and attach to another system.
When you use Apple software to stripe the two internal drives of a Mac Mini, the recovery hard disk is removed. That means you will need to boot from a next journal drive to run Disk Utility and figure out what happened to the volume structure.

Fast SDHC cards are getting so inexpensive that I pretty much make one of those for every Mac Mini so it has a recovery OS to boot from for maintenance like this. Of course a USB drive works well too. 

Get yourself a new drive and worst case, use internet recovery to install the OS on to an external drive so you have something to boot from. If you have a backup, you could wipe the two drives and run internet recovery as well to just fix or reinstall the OS on the empty drives.