Just bought a Mini XL, having a problem

[IDtheTarget]

I just received my MiniXL Diskless. I have four disks that I used to use in a Synology box, and four more that I've purchased. All are WD Red 3TB drives. For some reason, the system is showing 9 drives, ada0 through ada8. On the volume manager, I'm seeing ada0 through ada8 except for ada2.

I thought that this was weird, so I found the shell and did an ls of /dev. I'm seeing ada0 through ada8, and ada2 has two partitions, just like the other three drives I'd used before. (note that the ada designations don't seem to follow the bay designations, because the used drives were put in slots 7 - 4). It even has a valid partition table, according to fdisk -p /dev/ada2.

So I don't want to continue setup, on the off chance that I'm about to overwrite the boot disk, whatever that is.

Note that I'm new to FreeNAS and BSD. I'm an old Linux guy, but it's been a year since I've been a regular admin on even a Linux box. So please be patient. But can anybody tell me what the hell is going on?

 

[Dice]

So it seems like ada0, ada2, ada4 and ada6 are from your old synology box.
IIRC it is pretty common practice for other systems to partition drives to accomodate for different drive sizes in their 'sort of raid solutions'.
So these partitions still being on the volume is expected.

One thing to note (since you referred to previous linux experiences) is that these device labels do change. They are not static or necessarily representative of a specific SATA port. Therefore - remember this when the time comes to figure out which drive is which. (there are tutorials somewhere on the forum and some ideas on how to practically setup yourself for easy identification). FreeNAS aint excelling in user-friendliness in this regard..

Regarding actually solving your problem, I'd expect the storage manager (somewhere) have a 'wipe' function. I'd expect that wipe would sort the partition problem out. If not, there should be plenty of other users having the right CLI command straight from the top of their dome....

(sidenote - what storage configuration are you planning to do?)

 

[pirateghost]

Sounds like ada2 is your boot device.

For reference, the number sequence is likely to never follow the order of the physical hardware


I don't see anything wrong here

 

[Dice]

Sounds like ada2 is your boot device.

Yeah based on it doesn't show up on the volume manager, but since it has 2 partitions..?

Might not be anything wrong. But still doesn't seem to add up.

 

[IDtheTarget]

Okay, sorry for the confusion. I went through and ran smartctl -a on all of the drives, and the ada2 drive is the 16GB SSD that's holding the OS like a couple of you mentioned. On systems I've built before, the /dev/sdx was assigned by port number and was relatively static. Between that and my seeing two partitions on the SSD, I jumped to a bad conclusion.

I took down the S/N's of all of my drives before I installed, and am using smartctl -a to figure out which /dev/adx each drive is assigned to. I figure that this will make it easier to replace the correct drive if one fails.

@Dice, I'm planning on running RaidZ2.

Thanks, guys! Sorry for the false alarm, I'll try to do more research before I put up another question.

 

[nojohnny101]

Don't sweat it, there is a lot to absorb when starting off in FreeNAS and soemtimes small details like this can be easily missed.

You'll find this community very helpful and friendly. It is assumed you will do a search and make an attempt to understand relevant FreeNAS materials (which it seems you have the correct frame of mind) but by all means, ask away, no one is a genius here and we expect nothing more from you.

 

[IDtheTarget]

Thanks, I appreciate it! I have been trying to read as much as I can on FreeNAS, I just don't have as much time free as I'd like. I'm a reservist that's currently mobilized stateside. I'm trying to get this set up so that when I go home on leave I can just plug it in and have it work for my family.

 

[wblock]

Please don't use fdisk, it's old and only understands MBR. Use gpart show ada0, which is new and handles all kinds of partition schemes. Another useful command is diskinfo -v ada0.

FreeBSD/FreeNAS device names are dynamic, at least the ada form.

 

[gpsguy]

@Bidule0hm 's got a script that would have made it easier for you.

Look for "Display drives identification infos (Device, GPTID, Serial)" in this message - https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...d-identification-and-backup-the-config.27365/

I took down the S/N's of all of my drives before I installed, and am using smartctl -a to figure out which /dev/adx each drive is assigned to

 

[IDtheTarget]

@Bidule0hm 's got a script that would have made it easier for you.

Look for "Display drives identification infos (Device, GPTID, Serial)" in this message - https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/scripts-to-report-smart-zpool-and-ups-status-hdd-cpu-t°-hdd-identification-and-backup-the-config.27365/

Hey, thanks! I'll implement some of that this weekend.