Recovering drives from raid z1

[Peg]

Hello everyone,
I hope someone can help.
I recently built a FreeNAS system from spare parts I had.
Briefly the parts I used are:
Asus P5K-E MB
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
8 GB Ram
5 WD 2TB Red Drives
4GB USB Stick

Installed FreeNAS 8.3.0 and configured with ZFS Z1.
Had system up and running and did not have many issues with FreeNAS but decided that I wanted to use the drives elsewhere.
So I started to dismantle the FreeNAS system by offloading all of the data and tried to disassemble the raid Z1 and this is where I started to have trouble.
Next I (I think it was destroy volume) which gives you the option to wipe the drives clean (mark drives as new check box) through the web GUI.
The screen turned red with the options block which I checked off destroy and mark the drives as new.
After about 8 hours I returned and it seemed nothing had changed on the web GUI so I checked on the root shell and it showed that my zpool was still intact and heathy.
So from the root menu I did a zpool destroy and it did just that.
So now what I am trying to do is restore my drives to a bare state so I can reformat them to what ever I desire.
I do not know if this is possible with FreeNAS ZFS Z1.
On a side note after I did the destroy my web GUI became useless and I am running from the root shell.
It appears that FreeNAS sees my drives I just am not sure what to do from here.
I appreciate any help I can get.
Thanks,

Peg

 

[ProtoSD]

The screen turned red with the options block which I checked off destroy and mark the drives as new.
After about 8 hours I returned and it seemed nothing had changed on the web GUI so I checked on the root shell and it showed that my zpool was still intact and heathy.

Welcome Peg,

This is the same problem people experience when they remove a disk to simulate a drive failure and the pool still thinks things are just peachy. We're all still patiently waiting for "zfsd" which should help improve the notification of disk issues and update the pool status. If you had tried to do a scrub, then I think it would have complained.

So from the root menu I did a zpool destroy and it did just that.
So now what I am trying to do is restore my drives to a bare state so I can reformat them to what ever I desire.
I do not know if this is possible with FreeNAS ZFS Z1.

Yes, it's possible. The destroy/mark drives as new that you did should have done this for you.

On a side note after I did the destroy my web GUI became useless and I am running from the root shell.

It appears that FreeNAS sees my drives I just am not sure what to do from here.
I appreciate any help I can get.
Thanks,

Peg

The destroy process is/was still running and froze up the GUI, though I don't think it should be doing this.

You can try "pgrep dd" and see if there are any dd processes writing to the disks.

You could also do "gpart show" and "gpart status", to see if the disks have any labels or partitions still.

 

[Peg]

Thanks ProtoSD,
Doing "pgrep dd" showed nothing.
Doing "gpart show" scrolled a lot of stuff (not sure how to pause a page)
Doing "gpart status" showed all of my drives but they were split into 2 parts. (ada0p1, ada0p2, ada1p1, ada1p2,...)
Hope that is a good sign.

 

[ProtoSD]

Thanks ProtoSD,
Doing "pgrep dd" showed nothing.

Thats a good sign.

Doing "gpart show" scrolled a lot of stuff (not sure how to pause a page)

You need to login with ssh and copy & paste the output, you can't capture/pause output from the GUI.

Doing "gpart status" showed all of my drives but they were split into 2 parts. (ada0p1, ada0p2, ada1p1, ada1p2,...)
Hope that is a good sign.

If your drives are still showing partitions, they haven't been wiped. The "p1" partition is usually swap space, and the "p2" partition is the remainder that ZFS uses.

If you go to Storage->Volumes->View Disks, there's a button for each disk where you can wipe it. I've never used it so I don't know how long it will take to complete. It should run in the background so the GUI doesn't freeze up (I think). If you do the pgrep command from above after you start it, you should be able to see the info for the process. I don't know how the GUI notifies you when it finishes.

 

[Peg]

That is where my problem starts. My GUI is no longer working.
When I click on the view discs tab/button nothing happens as well as any thing else I try from the GUI.
Is there a way I can accomplish this from the root shell prompt?

 

[ProtoSD]

You can try these two commands, after changing ada1 to match the disk you want to erase.

You should be able to get a list of your disks by doing camcontrol devlist

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 bs=1m count=1
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 bs=1m oseek=`diskinfo ada1 | awk '{print int($3 / (1024*1024)) - 4;}'`