repeated message "SOCD report detected: (iBoot panic)" when starting

Time Machine is a very good choice today.

But there was no well-worn path to follow, and a few obscure long-term issues did develop (and get resolved) over time. The biggest [in my opinion] was that the drives that held your backups were in use over a very long time, and over that long period, might develop Bad Blocks or problems with the 'database' integrity.

This was resolved by having time machine periodically run an internal check of your backup set. The result, invisible to all but a few users, is that time machine might one day tell you, "Your backup set is not good enough, and Time Machine wants you to start a new one."

To that end, Users can also ask Time Machine to check backup integrity on demand, by holding Option key while clicking on the Time machine Icon on the menubar. This reveals an additional choice, 'Verify Backups'

System On a chip Daemon (SOCD) reports SERIOUS Hardware errors that occur in the Apple-Silicon System On a Chip.

if it occurs once and is gone, just ignore it.

if it is occurring often, you need to contact Apple Support and work with them. The ideal outcome is for them to DIRECT an Apple Service Provider to repair (by replacing) your mainboard.

The risk of going to the Genius Bar directly with this is that they may run their diagnostics, not see it happen, and return your computer to you un-repaired. The Genius Bar technicians generally do not read panic reports.

You MUST have backups before submitting your Mac for this service. Your boot drive will NOT be returned to you, and your files will NOT automatically be saved.

Grant Bennet-Alder - Your post makes me concerned. I've had this problem [(SOCD report detected: (iBoot panic)] happen twice now in two or three days. Both times it happened when I rebooted my 2021 MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) with the Apple M1 Max chip (64 GB). I initiated the reboot both times.

Both times I rebooted, things seemed fine at first, but then my MBP became completely unresponsive and rebooted a second time (I saw the screen go pink very briefly).

I don't know if this is relevant, but I have been having problems with disks in a SoftRAID volume on an external OWC Thunderbay enclosure. They started taking a long time to access. For instance, if I'd try to drag a screenshot from Finder to Skype, instead of being instant, there would be a 10-20 second delay with a spinning beachball (and this even though the disks were already spinning). So I ran DiskWarrior to fix it, which I think it has done. When this SOCD error occurred, both times the boot up process never got to the point of my MBP asking me for the passwords for a couple of encrypted volumes on my Thunderbay (my MBP asks for those passwords every time I reboot). My MBP did ask for the passwords once it automatically rebooted after the SOCD error.

Does this sound like the problem is with my MBP? I would rather not start down the road of a repair on it if I can avoid doing so, of course.

I stand by what I wrote above:

System On a chip Daemon (SOCD) reports SERIOUS Hardware errors that occur in the Apple-Silicon System On a Chip.

if it occurs once and is gone, just ignore it.

if it is occurring often, you need to contact Apple Support and work with them.

Cubo Estudio--

please start a new discussion and give it a title that will attract the readers you want to look at it. Posting here on the tail end of this thread will not get you the personalized attention you deserve.

be sure to include what model-year Mac along with what version MacOS and specifics about your hardware.

In the meantime, make certain you have recent Trusted Backups available, and work to keep them up to date.

If things go badly, you could be facing a sudden major outage.

If you need any suggestions or help with that, Readers would love to advise, anywhere from general approaches the most minute details.

Thanks. That's good to know (about the periodic verification and the ability to do it manually). I certify my hard drives using SoftRAID when I buy them. I don't think I've ever had a problem with a hard drive once I've done that, but that's not something that's going to fully ensure data integrity over time. I could setup a SoftRAID volume to use as my Time Machine disk. That would add redundancy.

Time machine may refuse to use a RAID as a backup destination on a locally-connected Mac.

The R in RAID is for redundant, but RAID is NOT backup!

• Mirrored RAID is used to reduce the time-to-repair after a failure, and to keep drive failures from becoming a data disaster. It does not protect from human error, crazy software, or 'just-because' failures.

• Striped RAID can be somewhat faster in some cases (especially in an array built from Rotating Magnetic drives), but it is brittle, and you MUST have another copy nearby in case of failure. A striped RAID failure destroys EVERYTHING on it, with No hope of recovery. Most users would be better served by a faster SSD than a striped rotating magnetic RAID.

• Concatenated RAID is not really RAID at all, it is "just a bunch of drives" aka JBOD, pasted together and acting as if it were one HUGE drive. So you can take two larger drives, concatenate them into one Volume, and have a really big Backup drive, for example.

• RAID 5 computes checksums of the data blocks (in real-time, coming and going), and stores two copies of the data AND the checksum blocks in such a way that a failure in any one of the three drives still allows the data can to be recovered from the other two drives. It requires checksum-computing hardware to be seen as anywhere near fast enough for most uses.

Criticisms of RAID-5 include the cost and delays induced by the extra hardware, and the HUGE amount of time it takes to re-create a large data set using RAID-5. Re-creation time is so large, another drive is non-trivially likely to fail in the time it takes to re-create the data, making the entire concept shaky.

Executive summary: Most users would be better served using multiple drives to make multiple backups, rather than dedicating multiple drives to RAID arrays.

on the latest Macs, bootable backups are no longer possible because the only MacOS the machine can execute is one that was written in place directly by that Mac, onto the locked and protected Virtual System Drive.

Hello!

I have the same problem since I update to 12.7.4 with a Mac Studio M1 Max. Because Apple take out support to FireWire Audio Drive in Ventura I can't move from Monterey so, the Blackmagic Dock I have to connect 4 SSD drives suddenly disappear from Finder and the Mac Studio restarted reporting this error.

What could it be? the computer? the dock? the Mac OS or everything!

Thanks!

Hi,

It's a one of common error on 1M Apple Silicon Macs. I recommend to upgrade to Ventura.

Be sure that before upgrade to Ventura, you should take bootable back up.

Okay, here's how I take that: It has happened twice. That's more than once, but not what I would deem often. If it keeps happening (like even once more), I'll get in touch with Apple. Thanks.

I have Time Machine up and running, with the resultant backups saved to an external 16 TB disk. I'm under the impression that Time Machine is very reliable.

Time machine is solid, but I LOVE SuperDuper because I can boot from the backup drive without restoring first...