Freenas nuked 4 brand new drives

[mruby]

I am trying to format some new drives (initialize them). I tried to add them to freenas zpool a few years ago, and when they formatted, they formatted weird because the raid controller did not recognize 3 tb drives I think they showed up as 2.2 tb or something.

I've since upgraded hardware that supports it, and am trying to use these drives now. They seem to be completely messed up. Freenas will recognize the drives, but errors out when trying to add them to a pool. It gives me some sort of read only error. I plug them into a windows box and try to initialize them as a gpt, and get "cannot access file" or something like that. I try to initialize them as mbr in windows and get a "cyclic redundancy check" error. I've tried formatting the partition table using gparted in linux, and I get read only file system errors. It shows that a partition is outside of the disk. I found a tutorial on gparted website to correct this issue, and could not make any changes due to the read only. I tried using diskpart in windows to remove read only attributes, and it failed. I've tried using minitool partition and the drive shows up as "bad disk" when I plug it in. I thought that it could redo the partition table and wipe the whole disk out as if it were brand new. I try doing the partition restoration, and let it run all night long. When I woke up, I did some math on the number of sectors scanned vs how many remain and it would take roughly 9,600 days to complete. Obviously that is not going to be useful.

I tried writing all zeros using WD disk tool, and got an error right away.

2 of the drives are WD red 3TB drives, and the other 2 are Toshiba 3TB drives.

Any ideas on what I can do? I have 4 disks all with the same problem, I've tried everything I can think of. They are brand new other than being added to freenas one time, with no actual data being written to them.

I refuse to believe there is no way to just "reset" them as if they were brand new from factory.

Thanks in advance!

 

[anodos]

I am trying to format some new drives (initialize them). I tried to add them to freenas zpool a few years ago, and when they formatted, they formatted weird because the raid controller did not recognize 3 tb drives I think they showed up as 2.2 tb or something.

I've since upgraded hardware that supports it, and am trying to use these drives now. They seem to be completely messed up. Freenas will recognize the drives, but errors out when trying to add them to a pool. It gives me some sort of read only error. I plug them into a windows box and try to initialize them as a gpt, and get "cannot access file" or something like that. I try to initialize them as mbr in windows and get a "cyclic redundancy check" error. I've tried formatting the partition table using gparted in linux, and I get read only file system errors. It shows that a partition is outside of the disk. I found a tutorial on gparted website to correct this issue, and could not make any changes due to the read only. I tried using diskpart in windows to remove read only attributes, and it failed. I've tried using minitool partition and the drive shows up as "bad disk" when I plug it in. I thought that it could redo the partition table and wipe the whole disk out as if it were brand new. I try doing the partition restoration, and let it run all night long. When I woke up, I did some math on the number of sectors scanned vs how many remain and it would take roughly 9,600 days to complete. Obviously that is not going to be useful.

I tried writing all zeros using WD disk tool, and got an error right away.

2 of the drives are WD red 3TB drives, and the other 2 are Toshiba 3TB drives.

Any ideas on what I can do? I have 4 disks all with the same problem, I've tried everything I can think of. They are brand new other than being added to freenas one time, with no actual data being written to them.

I refuse to believe there is no way to just "reset" them as if they were brand new from factory.

Thanks in advance!

dban them

 

[mruby]

dban them

Thanks for the quick reply!

I've heard of it, but never used it. Just looking at their website, I noticed this:

DBAN users should be aware of some product limitations, including:

• No guarantee of data removal (e.g. DBAN does not detect or securely erase SSDs)
• No audit-ready reporting for regulatory compliance
• Limited hardware support (e.g. no RAID dismantling)
• No customer support or regular software updates

specifically "no RAID dismantling". Does that mean, if it was ever initialized by a raid controller that it wont work?

Either way, I'm going to try it out and see what happens.

 

[razvanc.mobile]

what raid controller were they on? wouldn't be a 3ware card by anychance?

Sent from my SM-N9005

 

[mruby]

what raid controller were they on? wouldn't be a 3ware card by anychance?

It was in fact a 3ware. a pretty old one. I might still have it if you need me to look up specifics.

Thanks!

 

[gpsguy]

Since you haven't used it - try it with the "quick" option.

If DBAN does't work, you might want to try NWIPE. The latter is a fork of DBAN.

You can find it on the SystemRescueCd (Live CD). I have used nwipe on HP servers, when DBAN didn't work. The gui is similar and uses the same commands.


Sent from my phone

 

[mruby]

ok, i just started a dban quick wipe and the estimated remaining time is 4272 hours (178 days) and rising.

It has 0 errors so far and has run for about 10 minutes.

This worries me a bit that its going so slow...

 

[razvanc.mobile]

older 3ware controllers (like 9500 series) used to "lock" the drives on, so you don't accidentaly move them to another array. Afaik the easiest way to recover access to the drives is to put them back on.that controller, and just delete the arrays.

Sent from my SM-N9005

 

[Fuganater]

And once this is all fixed.... get a LSI HBA instead.

 

[SweetAndLow]

This seems strange, shouldn't a normal dd to the /dev/sdaX device clean things up? It should just write straight to the disk and wipe everything no questions asked.

 

[solarisguy]

older 3ware controllers (like 9500 series) used to "lock" the drives on, so you don't accidentaly move them to another array. Afaik the easiest way to recover access to the drives is to put them back on.that controller, and just delete the arrays.

Sent from my SM-N9005

Yes, it was not FreeNAS anything, but the ancient (that is why it had seen 2.2 TB and not 3 TB!) controller that is making you suffer.

As razvanc.mobile suggested, using the old controller delete RAID status from those disks.

P.S.
S.M.A.R.T. would tell you whether the disks are OK. Most likely they are, unless you did something weird to them.

 

[solarisguy]

ok, i just started a dban quick wipe and the estimated remaining time is 4272 hours (178 days) and rising.

It has 0 errors so far and has run for about 10 minutes.

This worries me a bit that its going so slow...

As you had noticed yourself, DBAN has no "RAID Dismantling" feature, so you should just stop it, and not waste your time on it.

If you cannot easily get your old controller up and running, then Blancco has a free evaluation license. Blancco download is on the same page as DBAN, and Blancco has the "RAID Dismantling" feature.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

shouldn't a normal dd to the /dev/sdaX device clean things up?

Not necessarily, there are ATA commands that can lock disks and make them appear inaccessible (one of which is the command required to prepare for ATA secure erase). I've only experienced this with drives taken out of DVRs, and I was able to resolve it by researching the commands (and maybe guessing the right password?) but I don't remember the exact details.

OP, please correct the thread title. FreeNAS didn't nuke your drives.

EDIT: s/SATA/ATA/

 

[mruby]

older 3ware controllers (like 9500 series) used to "lock" the drives on, so you don't accidentaly move them to another array. Afaik the easiest way to recover access to the drives is to put them back on.that controller, and just delete the arrays.

I don't know how many hours i've wasted on other forums, with tech support at WD, messing with things on my own trying to figure something out, and absolutely nothing worked. This was the right answer in my case. I am SOOOOO glad you saw this and posted. It was a huge pain to dismantle my rig down in the crawl space and do this, but it worked like a charm. I was able to initialize them as gpt in windows just now for a quick test. wow, I am so happy right now, thanks again!

And once this is all fixed.... get a LSI HBA instead.

I have the m1015 as suggested in hardware threads. Its been working fine for a year or so (since I upgraded mobo and ditched the super old 3ware cards). The only issue I need to deal with now is that I think the firmware on it is old. I keep getting warning in freenas that it is older than the driver version or something. I believe it is version 14. Having never attempted to flash a card, i've been reluctant to try since nothing seems to be wrong at the moment.

Yes, it was not FreeNAS anything, but the ancient (that is why it had seen 2.2 TB and not 3 TB!) controller that is making you suffer.

Yes, no offense was intended here, I am just obviously green when it comes to this stuff, so after hours of trial an error, this was my conclusion that the fact that I had previously initialized them in freenas, that it had to be related somehow.

S.M.A.R.T. would tell you whether the disks are OK. Most likely they are, unless you did something weird to them.

you are correct, I was able to run SMART tests with no issues when I started trouble shooting all of this.

If you cannot easily get your old controller up and running, then Blancco has a free evaluation license. Blancco download is on the same page as DBAN, and Blancco has the "RAID Dismantling" feature.

I will remember this if I have the problem again, thanks for the suggestion.

I wanted to thank everyone once again for the prompt and very helpful replies. It saved me a lot of headache!

 

[solarisguy]

[...] I have the m1015 as suggested in hardware threads. Its been working fine for a year or so (since I upgraded mobo and ditched the super old 3ware cards). The only issue I need to deal with now is that I think the firmware on it is old. I keep getting warning in freenas that it is older than the driver version or something. I believe it is version 14. Having never attempted to flash a card, i've been reluctant to try since nothing seems to be wrong at the moment. [...]

You can take a look at the firmware update steps (to P20) I had posted today https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?posts/241509/

I hope they are easy to understand.

 

[depasseg]

I don't know how many hours i've wasted on other forums, with tech support at WD, messing with things on my own trying to figure something out, and absolutely nothing worked. This was the right answer in my case. I am SOOOOO glad you saw this and posted. It was a huge pain to dismantle my rig down in the crawl space and do this, but it worked like a charm. I was able to initialize them as gpt in windows just now for a quick test. wow, I am so happy right now, thanks again!

I'm glad you got things working. It would be helpful to change the thread title to "3Ware RAID controller nuked my drives"