SOLVED Plugging in two drives causing boot failure

[BigDave]

System config will be listed at bottom of post.

First a bit of history on the two drives in question. Model No. WD1001FALS Caviar Black 1TB SATA 32MB cache, 07-DEC-2009. These drives were installed in my personal desktop and were recently replaced due to their age. The data on the NFS formatted drives was deleted and the partitions deleted as well.
I originally tried to place them in my FreeNAS server as they came out of my desktop by shutting down FreeNAS, plugging the two drives into the bays and starting the server.
FreeNAS failed to complete the boot process. (SEE screenie below)

My goal here was to connect these drives to the machine so that I could run tests (badblocks/smart-long) and possibly use them for jails testing (or some other use),
but please know I'm smart enough to avoid adding these drives to my Vdev.

The Google results (with this error) while numerous, seem to have nothing to do with adding drives to FreeNAS.

A LITTLE HELP HERE PLEASE!

FreeNAS-11.0-U4 (54848d13b) ON METAL, no VMs or Jails!
Boot drive attached SATA ada0 Intel X-25E 32GB
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz
RAM 16317MB ECC
X9SCM-F
M1015 FW 20.00.07.00 IT mode
SC-836 with SAS2 EL1 backplane
Pool 6-4TB RAIDz2

While I wait for some help, I'm gonna fire up the test server and see if adding the drives to that machine, result in the same behavior.
Thanks!
Dave

edit: added boot drive info

 

[BigDave]

While I wait for some help, I'm gonna fire up the test server and see if adding the drives to that machine, result in the same behavior.

And it does the same with an almost identical machine...

 

[rs225]

maybe they have something at the end of the drive that resembles a RAID set marker?

 

[BigDave]

maybe they have something at the end of the drive that resembles a RAID set marker?

As in jumper pins?

 

[BigDave]

Did some further testing by plugging in an old 128GB Crucial RealSSD C300 model and FreeNAS booted without issue and now shows the SSD as available to the Volume Manager. WTF!

 

[wblock]

It says right there in the first message: GEOM_RAID. That is a FreeBSD driver for motherboard RAID, supporting lots of different vendors. The vendors put metadata of varying sizes either at the beginning or end of the disk. When that disk is connected to that motherboard, the metadata is hidden. When the FreeBSD driver detects it, it tries to build a hardware-like, non-ZFS RAID array as defined in the metadata. The neat thing about the FreeBSD driver is that these motherboard RAID arrays can be used on motherboards that don't have the built-in hardware (really just a ROM). The bad thing is that if the metadata is not erased before the disk is used elsewhere, it can cause problems like this.

I think FreeNAS has the geom_raid module separate from the kernel, so it can be unloaded. But it must be unloaded before the drive is connected, or it will detect the disk.

It might be possible to let it detect, then use graid(8) to destroy the array. Otherwise, I'd connect the disk through a known-good* USB adapter and erase the first and last megabyte with dd(1). After that, the disk will work normally.

[*: known-good meaning a USB adapter that does not play the same type of games by putting its own metadata on the disks. Some do. We've also seen some that have an off-by-one block error that has the same sort of effect.]

 

[BigDave]

Otherwise, I'd connect the disk through a known-good* USB adapter and erase the first and last megabyte with dd(1). After that, the disk will work normally.

I don't have anything around to connect the drive via USB :(
I'll try to find some way to zero out the drives and try to plug them back in and see if FreeNAS will boot with them connected. Thanks Warren!

 

[BigDave]

Trying diskpart through Windows Power Shell to perform a clean all command on the drives. I only have one data cable available in my desktop machine, so I'm having to do one drive at a time

 

[wblock]

I don't know if the Windows utilities will work. If this is still on the same motherboard that created the array, use the BIOS to destroy it. If it will let you. Otherwise, consider using mfsbsd.

 

[BigDave]

I don't know if the Windows utilities will work. If this is still on the same motherboard that created the array, use the BIOS to destroy it. If it will let you. Otherwise, consider using mfsbsd.

The drives were never part of an array in windows, just used as separate storage drives in my desktop.
diskpart worked just fine! Plugged both drives into the FreeNAS server when I got home just now and
they showed up right away in the volume manager. Thanks for helping me out with this, I appreciate it!