Expand ZFS size

[Robert Trevellyan]

Let's label it "for future reference."

 

[gpsguy]

I tried to avoid this issue in the first place by telling him to use DBAN with the quick option.


Sent from my phone

 

[CLSegraves]

Just finished this morning (finished some time in the middle of the night) and it did indeed mount this time. The drive is resilvering so when it finishes, I'll pull the other drive and wipe it using DBAN.

Something I can now confirm is that the RAID card did indeed limit the partition size, which is why I could never get the drive to grow. I know this because the first time I attempted to wipe the drive, I stuck it into my Windows desktop and used disk manager to delete the partition. Before deleting the partition, I noted that the partitioned size was 2.2TB (exactly what FreeNAS was seeing), and it had 1.8TB of unallocated space. So it seem that once the drive was partitioned, FreeNAS couldn't grow it (which is reasonable).

Once everything is finished, I'll report back.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I tried to avoid this issue in the first place by telling him to use DBAN with the quick option.

Even the quick option does a read/verify pass.

The quickest option is SATA secure erase, for which I generally use the Drive Reset utility from the RedoBackup live CD.

 

[jgreco]

Just finished this morning (finished some time in the middle of the night) and it did indeed mount this time. The drive is resilvering so when it finishes, I'll pull the other drive and wipe it using DBAN.

That's why we like DBAN. I could actually show you a way to wipe a disk from the shell in less than five minutes sufficiently to make FreeNAS see it as blank but sometimes the brute force is just the easier way.

 

[CLSegraves]

Okay, all completed and the pool now shows as 3.52TB total space. Thanks for the help everyone!

Recap (in case someone runs into this in the future):

I had an older RAID card that limited the format size on my drives to 2.2TB (the remaining space was unallocated). The solution was to:
- remove the RAID card
- connect the drives directly to the motherboard
- one-by-one wipe the drives with DBAN and reinstall, allowing FreeNAS to reformat and resilver the drives to full size

It's a slow process, but in the end it works without any data loss.

 

[gpsguy]

Congratulations!

 

[jgreco]

Okay, all completed and the pool now shows as 3.52TB total space. Thanks for the help everyone!

Glad to hear it. All this fun with stupid hardware limitations...