Removing 2x Drives from FreeNAS, Now stuck in Raid? Both bricked HELP PLEASE

[Werner12]

Hi, i've been struggling with this issue for over a month and have put well over 100 hours into fixing it. I'm quite familiar with hardware etc but not very familiar with FreeNAS/linux etc.

I setup a FreeNAS Server with
- a AMD motherboard,
- 2x , 3TB Seagate HDD's
- FreeNAS bootable USB

I no longer wanted to use the drives in FreeNAS and just removed the bootable usb thinking that I will be able to format the drives in Windwos/Linux etc.
The drives will NOT format in Disk Utility on windows, or even mount on Linux.

- I've tried to use Disk Utility to Initialise them, but I get an I/O error and they are listed as 3.9GB in capacity
- I've tried to Clean them using Disk Part, the clean function works but it doesn't change anything (they stay listed as 3.9GB)
- I"ve tried to use DBAN to nuke the drives/overwrite them with 0's, this didnt do anything either
- I've attempted to get into my motherboard raid configuration but I cant get this to work as I'm not 100% of how to do this.
- The drives no longer come up in FreeNAS

Can someone please assist me? I've got $150 drives that are totally bricked right now....

Thank you, I really appreciate any help. I am at the point of rage with this issue.

 

[melloa]

- The drives no longer come up in FreeNas

After all you did to them, it wont. At least as your FreeNAS volume.

Try to get gparted live, delete all partitions, create new one compatible with the OS you are installing. Your data will be lost, but I assume is gone already.

 

[Werner12]

After all you did to them, it wont. At least as your freenas volume.

Try to get gparted live, delete all partitions, create new one compatible with the OS you are installing. Your data will be lost, but I assume is gone already.

I get this error with Gparted. Im trying again now with a fresh boot of Gparted.

 

[melloa]

I get this error with Gparted. Im trying again now with a fresh boot of Gparted.

gparted live? CD/USB? Never hard this problem. I've been using it to "fix" my disks moving from/to FreeNAS, Synology, TrueOS, RockStor, etc when needed.

 

[Werner12]

gparted live? CD/USB? Never hard this problem. I've been using it to "fix" my disks moving from/to FreeNAS, Synology, TrueOS, RockStor, etc when needed.

 

[melloa]

As per google: A message such as "Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sdb1: Input/output error" often indicates a hardware problem. This can be as simple as a loose cable, or as serious as a failing drive.

Try reseating cables, move sata ports, etc.

 

[wblock]

It's not clear whether you were using motherboard RAID. Were these drives part of a motherboard RAID array?

 

[Werner12]

As per google: A message such as "Error fsyncing/closing /dev/sdb1: Input/output error" often indicates a hardware problem. This can be as simple as a loose cable, or as serious as a failing drive.

Try reseating cables, move sata ports, etc.

Nope :(the issue is only with the two particular drives.

 

[Werner12]

It's not clear whether you were using motherboard RAID. Were these drives part of a motherboard RAID array?

I believe I set up the FreeNAS server in Raid 1 or Mirror, it would have been onboard motherboard raid if it is indeed raid.

 

[IceBoosteR]

Using onbaord RAID is always a bad idea, as FreeNAS/ZFS would like to habe all access to the physical drives, not only to logical ones.
So looking at your error messages, I do not think that your drives are gone forever. Maybe the MBR gots broken and no OS can load it - or you can some bad cables.
Maybe you can try to put it in an external case. FreeNAS is putting your physical drive in these partitions (I use encryption, so I got the .eli there also):

You can normally see this on the shell:

Code:

116 0 crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x74 Jul 27 16:40 ada0
120 0 crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x78 Jul 27 16:40 ada0p1
176 0 crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0xb0 Jul 27 16:41 ada0p1.eli
122 0 crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x7a Jul 27 16:40 ada0p2

So move the drives away from the hardware RAID first. Go again with GPARTED. You should see the physical disk. If they do not show up, there is a hardware error mostly the port or cable, and not the drives controller ;)
The hardest way i would go is to dd the first 1000 blocks with zeros manually, when you get it to mount anywhere.
What does Windows show when you put in the disk?
Do you see it in the device manager?

 

[gpsguy]

Please let us know what brand/model number your motherboard is.

My guess is that the OP has a desktop board with fake raid.

 

[rs225]

If it is possible to run FreeNAS, I would try camcontrol identify ada1 or the correct device name on each of them and post results.

Also a gpart show ada1 for each

 

[Werner12]

Using onbaord RAID is always a bad idea, as FreeNAS/ZFS would like to habe all access to the physical drives, not only to logical ones.
So looking at your error messages, I do not think that your drives are gone forever. Maybe the MBR gots broken and no OS can load it - or you can some bad cables.
Maybe you can try to put it in an external case. FreeNAS is putting your physical drive in these partitions (I use encryption, so I got the .eli there also):

You can normally see this on the shell:

Code:

116 0 crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x74 Jul 27 16:40 ada0
120 0 crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x78 Jul 27 16:40 ada0p1
176 0 crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0xb0 Jul 27 16:41 ada0p1.eli
122 0 crw-r-----  1 root  operator  0x7a Jul 27 16:40 ada0p2

So move the drives away from the hardware RAID first. Go again with GPARTED. You should see the physical disk. If they do not show up, there is a hardware error mostly the port or cable, and not the drives controller ;)
The hardest way i would go is to dd the first 1000 blocks with zeros manually, when you get it to mount anywhere.
What does Windows show when you put in the disk?
Do you see it in the device manager?

Im not entirely sure what you mean with the shell stuff but I'll look into it.
As for Disk Utility, it does come up but it shows the drives as 3.9GB in size each, they cannot be initialized due to an I/O error, in Disk Part, they can be cleaned but it doesn't do anything to solve the problem.

I don't think its the cables either as I use the same cable to check that windows boots from my other drive.

I've tried just installing the drives in my main pc with SATA cables and there doesn't seem to be any difference as compared to with the hardware raid switched on.

 

[Werner12]

Please let us know what brand/model number your motherboard is.

My guess is that the OP has a desktop board with fake raid.

MSI A78m-E35
This is the Mobo I initially used with FreeNAS, and i've tried to fix the issue with a number of motherboards including two different Z270 boards.

 

[wblock]

I believe I set up the FreeNAS server in Raid 1 or Mirror, it would have been onboard motherboard raid if it is indeed raid.

This does not really narrow it down. ZFS can do mirrors also.

It might just be a problem of using disk tools that only see the fake PMBR created on GPT disks. Until this is determined, it's hard to suggest more. I would not use Linux or Windows tools. gpart on FreeNAS or FreeBSD is my go-to disk tool.

 

[Stux]

2x , 3TB Seagate HDD's

I've had Seagate 1.5TB drives spontaneously fail like this. One of their failure modes was to present a tiny disk, say just a few MB. I suspected this was the firmware partition.

And they liked to fail in pairs too. I had over a 120% failure rate with those drives. One left. Warranty replacements failed too you see.

The Seagate 3TB were notorious. What is the model number of the drives?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Smart data? I like the method of dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 and wait 20min then kill it. That will nuke just about anything funky the drive has going on.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[wblock]

Smart data? I like the method of dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 and wait 20min then kill it. That will nuke just about anything funky the drive has going on.

The problem is that sometimes the metadata is at the end of the drive, and people typically don't use a bs= parameter to dd, so it takes forever writing a block at a time. Well, and also that dd has never had a "relative to the end of the drive" offset, so it's a pain to erase just the last part of the drive.

 

[SweetAndLow]

The problem is that sometimes the metadata is at the end of the drive, and people typically don't use a bs= parameter to dd, so it takes forever writing a block at a time. Well, and also that dd has never had a "relative to the end of the drive" offset, so it's a pain to erase just the last part of the drive.

What's at the end of the drive? I always see most things at the front especially if it's a boot partition or data. Maybe a single swap partition is at the end and that usually doesn't mess things up.

I think the disks might be dead and would be interested to see smart data and run a smart test.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Stux]

What's at the end of the drive?

A backup GPT header and partition table