I have a hard drive that is recognized by computer but not by freenas 11.2

[Newberry]

Hi everyone. I am needing help to fix a problem. I have read user manual for my computer and for freeNAS without finding a solution. I am hoping someone can help. I have a Dell Poweredge T410. It has 2.4 ghz processor and 64gb of ram. I installed 6 hotswappable 3tb red hard drives in the front bays of the computer. I also have 8 2tb hard drives in an expansion bay as well as 4 2tb hard drives in another expansion bay. The problem I have is that when I boot computer I can see as bios loads up the 6 3tb drives as well as all the other drives. But when FreeNAS 11.2 boots I only see 5 of the 6 3tb drives. When watching the indicator light on the drives all of them except for the last one. Then when I go to the remote portal it doesn't show that drive. I have purchase another drive and replaced the other drive with no results. Also when FreeNas is booted up completely I can remove that drive and the T410 says it is removed but FreeNAS doesn;t see anything. Can anyone help?

 

[jro]

If you've tried different disks in that slot and they're both doing the same thing, I'd guess the plug on the backplane is messed up. Is it a single SAS cable running to the backplane? Or individual SATA cables? If they're individual SATA cables, make sure all of them are fully seated and maybe replace the one for the wonky slot.

Do you have any SATA ports on the motherboard you could use for testing? Connect the drive that's giving you problems to that port to see if it gets recognized that way.

 

[Newberry]

Thanks for the reply. There are are 2 cables connecting the 6 drives to a PCI card. The issue for me is the the Bios recognizes the drive but FreeNAS does not. If it was a cable problem then the drive would not be recognized on boot up. Please correct me if I am wrong. I am by no means an expert.

 

[jro]

No, you're not wrong, but it's possible your BIOS is only doing a cursory check of disk connections and when the OS tries to access the disk, it runs into issues. There really isn't any software reason why FreeNAS wouldn't recognize one of six identical drives and since you've already tried a new drive in that bay and got the same result, that likely rules out a hardware issue with the drive itself. In my mind, that leaves the backplane, the cabling between the backplane and the HBA/motherboard, and the HBA/motherboard itself.

If you do want to dive more into software troubleshooting, run camcontrol devlist in your terminal and post the output on here. We can take a look to see if the drive possibly appears to the system at a low level, but some error is preventing it from showing up in the web UI.

 

[Newberry]

OK. All that makes sense. There are 2 cables that connect the 6 drives. I will check the cables, backplane and the HBA/motherboard card 1st and see what the results are. Thanks for the advise. I will post my results.

 

[jro]

While you're checking them, it might make sense to re-seat both sides of each cable if they're easily accessible.

 

[Newberry]

Ok. Found out it was my raid card causing the issue. I replaced it and now the drive is available. Thanks for all your help jro.