Not been this frustrated for years

[tommytomato]

My apologies in advance if I appear frustrated. I am trying desperately not to vent.

I installed FreeNas 8.0 on a 4GB USB stick in an HP Proliant Microserver with 2x 1TB Samsung Spinpoint HD103SJ. Almost immediately, but intermittantly as I altered volumes, I began to get the 'unable to calculate [various space] .....' error messages in the active volume screen. After raising a ticket, it appears I was stupid enough to download the version of FreeNas that is offered on the front page of the website. Of course, I should have known it had this bug and that instead I required a version 3 or later of the 8.0.1 BETA that is not even indexed on the front page!

So, after 'upgrading' to BETA4, I once again tried to create a volume. Doing so on either one of my disks in isolation generates a message about being unable to GPT format the disk, and in attempting to create a RAID1 a message about not being able to store metadata on ada0, operation not permitted, appears. Two errors for the price of one now.

I desperately want to use FreeNAS and avoid WHS2011, but it has to work. I don't have the time to put into setting up a system with very little documentation and apparently so many issues.

If I appear frustrated, I apologise, but in the main I am so because the download page provides what appears to be an unstable release!

If anyone can help, I would be eternally grateful. If not, I will have to look elsewhere. At the end of the day users must feel confident that their data is safe.

 

[ProtoSD]

I'm not sure I can help you completely, but how much experience do you have working at the command line?

It sounds like you have an old partition/data left on the drive that is 'confusing' FreeNAS and you need to zero out your disks. There's a thread here somewhere about doing that but I can't find it right now. I'll update if I do, but but basically you could try using the 'dd' command to zero out your disks and see if that helps.

UPDATE: Here's the thread http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?1035-Zeroing-drives&highlight=zeroing

Let us know if you don't understand how to do this and someone can elaborate and see if that helps you solve your problem. Sorry your so frustrated, hang in there, once you get over the bump, you should really like FreeNAS.

 

[tommytomato]

Thanks protosd, I am very grateful to you for jumping in to help a curmudgeonly old grump like me (I'm not usually so). I am okay on the command line though quite rusty. Shall go and zero now then report back. Thanks again.

 

[tommytomato]

Quick update. I tried to zero the first disk using:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0

.... but the operation was not allowed. Clearly, I'm rustier than I thought. Having read about how long zeroing could take (if I could make it happen), I decided to wipe the drive in an old fashioned DOS environment and then represent it to FreeNAS to set-up.

However, instead, I took the disk over to a Win 7 machine and initialised it with GPT partitioning. A volume could then be set-up in FreeNAS. However, despite the sizes now showing up properly, the status remains 'unknown' and if I try to destroy the volume, nothing happens. Is this simply a feature of FreeNAS still setting up the volume or that something remains wrong?

Update:
The 'unknown' volume status message remained, so ..... believe it or not, I removed the USB FreeNAS OS stick from the Microserver and added a USB floppy drive! I then booted up into DOS with an old Win98 FDD, and once at the command prompt swapped the floppy out for one containing a very, very old DOS utility called 'Wipe' which surprisingly enough writes zeros to the drive. I ran it on both Samsung hard disks for about 5 minutes each (enough to write over quite a few sectors), replaced the USB stick and booted into FreeNAS. It worked and I now have a RAID1 system running. I know it is mad, but it was faster than zeroing the drives and sometimes the old methods just get the job done.

Thanks again protosd for coming to my rescue at the darkest hour, it is appreciated. I shall run FreeNAS for a while, but may still end up with WHS2011, simply because that is where I am comfortable that I can sort things out if they go wrong, and also because I fear the same issues occurring again if I add another volume to the server in FreeNAS at a later date.

 

[matthewowen01]

my guess is you had not elevated your privlages. type 'su' then your password.

 

[survive]

Hello tommytomato,

Try this....grab a gpartd livecd from here:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

and use that to wipe out all the partition info on your data drives. That should get you to a good spot to give it another try.

-Will

 

[jim82]

Allright, I think you've got some "unwanted" data in the first sectors of your disks. Swapping the drives to Windows, is not the way to go.

Here's what I recommend:


1) Go to services in FreeNAS, click the wrench next to "SSH" and tick "Login with root as password". Now enable the service.
2) Grap "Putty", here -> http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe
3) Open a SSH session with Putty to the ip address of your FreeNAS box.
4) Login with "root" and "freenas" as password without the hyphens.
5) Clean the MBR of your disks, with this command:

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=512 count=1 && dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 bs=512 count=1

of course verify that your disks are infact "ada0" and "ada1".

6) Reboot FreeNAS
7) Verify under "Storage" that your array is gone
8) Clear all browser cache and cookies for the IP/Hostname of the FreeNAS box. This might seem stupid, but trust me, it has solved many weird issues with the web-interface for me.
9) Try creating your array again, and report back here please :)

/Jim

 

[mko]

If dd complaints about permissions, try this:

sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=0x10

 

[tommytomato]

Thank you everyone for the help. It is appreciated. There is still something wrong because I cannot now create a Windows share and the volume size is a little small, so there is still unwanted information on the disk.

@jim82 I did as instructed. The output after running the code was:

dd: /dev/ada0 Operation not permitted

@mko Thank you, that did happen so followed your direction. Was then able to run the code from jim82.

Will now attempt to create the array again and report back.

 

[tommytomato]

The volume/array still remains. This is the output from the PuTTY screen:

hedgehog# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=512 count=1 && dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 bs=512 count=1
dd: /dev/ada0: Operation not permitted
hedgehog#
hedgehog# sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=0x10
kern.geom.debugflags: 0 -> 16
hedgehog# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=512 count=1 && dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 bs=512 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred in 0.020031 secs (25560 bytes/sec)
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred in 0.019857 secs (25784 bytes/sec)
hedgehog# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=512 count=1 && dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 bs=512 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred in 0.028753 secs (17807 bytes/sec)
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred in 0.017332 secs (29541 bytes/sec)
hedgehog#

 

[jim82]

Excellent, now your MBR is clean on both disks. I'm thinking that you might need to make a fresh clean install of FreeNAS to make it work properly.

 

[ProtoSD]

The volume/array still remains.

Make sure you delete the old volume before trying to create a new one. FreeNAS is going to see the device names from those nicely wiped drives and complain because it thinks they already belong to the old volume but doesn't find any info on the disks.

 

[tommytomato]

It won't allow me to delete the volume, and has not done so since the installation of BETA4. I just removed everything using gparted but the volume info remains. So do we think the installation is corrupt then? I upgraded 8.0 to 8.0.1 using the BETA4 live ISO.

 

[tommytomato]

I got rid of the volume by exporting it. Then it was back to the same error messages that existed at the start of all this, so I followed the procedures again and am back at the point where the volume exists but I cannot create a Windows share because it is not possible to define a path.

I'm losing the will to live with all this. If the concensus is a reinstall, I will do it.

 

[ProtoSD]

what do you see when you do a 'df' from the command line? Just tell us what you see that starts with /mnt

 

[tommytomato]

hedgehog# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ufs/FreeNASs1a 948903 431960 441030 49% /
devfs 1 1 0 100% /dev
/dev/md0 4526 2486 1678 60% /etc
/dev/md1 686 8 624 1% /mnt
/dev/md2 76526 13144 57260 19% /var
/dev/ufs/FreeNASs4 20263 816 17826 4% /data
/dev/ufs/Hoggy1 946019860 4 870338268 0% /mnt/Hoggy1
hedgehog#

 

[ProtoSD]

ok, so your volume exists, the path is /mnt/Hoggy1. I'm trying to read back thru the posts and see what your current state is. Does the volume exist in the Web GUI when you go to Storage -> Volumes -> View All Volumes ??

There's a little icon there like a little tiny stack of disks with circular arrows that says 'Auto Import' when you put your mouse over it. If viewing all volumes doesn't show your volume, click on that icon and let it import your volume.

I'm a little lost on the current state of your setup, but if no volumes are showing there, then you won't be able to SHARE because FreeNAS doesn't have the path to your volume in the database even though it's there at the command line.

I'm sorry things aren't being cooperative! I'm having my own issues, but it's beta so I can't complain. What you are trying to do shouldn't be as difficult.

 

[tommytomato]

Yes the volume exists as a RAID1 array in Storage and shows a status of 'complete'. The problem now is I cannot make a Windows share because there is nothing to browse to in the Path field and manual entry of the path does not appear to work either. I am beginning to wonder if this is a beta issue, the problem is that 8.0 does not work for me as it fails to report the Used, Available, Size and Status fields of Volumes in Storage, hence the upgrade to 8.0.1.

Sorry to hear you are having issues too. I am seriously wondering whether FreeNAS 7 might be my answer, or just bite the bullet and go with WHS :(

 

[tommytomato]

Okay, found the problem, I think. SMART was off in Services, which is odd because it had been on pre-upgrade and was shown as on in Storage. Somehow the service itself was off. As soon as I activated it (which was a bit hit and miss trying to drag the switch 'on'), I was able to navigate to the volume in Windows shares.

Thank you so much for all the help. Tonight has been quite an experience. I really hope you can get yours to do what you want it to.

Thank you again to all who have taken the trouble to help me.

 

[ProtoSD]

Hmmm, you shouldn't have had trouble with 8.0 either, but 8.0 had trouble importing some volumes.

Just on a whim, under Services, do you have the CIFS service turned on? Maybe if that isn't enabled it won't let you choose your path. I think once they get to 8.01 Release things will hopefully be golden, so I wouldn't go for .7 unless you just gotta get this done ASAP.

Check that CIFS is turned on under Services. If that isnt' it I'm at a loss, and maybe someone else has an idea. Thanks for hanging in there all day and letting everyone try to help though.


GUESS WE JUST REPLIED AT THE SAME TIME... Glad you got it, but SMART shouldn't have been needed to be turned on, just CIFS....