SOLVED Returning drives to non ZFS state

[climb2bhi]

Over the past couple of years I have had to replace several drives from my system due to SMART errors. The drives I have removed were 4TB WD drives. After removing them I have been unable to return them to 4TB status. They always show up as 1.6TB which I believe is the parity partition from ZFS2. I have even wiped them using my FreeNAS system prior to removal and once FreeNAS says wipe complete, they still come up as 1.6TB on any other system. Even Active@ KillDisk only wipes the 1.6TB partition and will not return it to 4TB.

Thanks.

 

[rs225]

I will assume you've made no mistakes with wiping.

Make sure they are partitioned for GPT. MBR partition can not go over 2.2TB.

If you are using a USB adapter or dock, it probably can't handle hard drives over 2TB.

If you are using motherboard or add-in SATA ports, your disk controller drivers might be old and can't handle drives over 2TB. Or, the ports can't handle over 2TB at all.

Warning: Once you have it working, make sure you never put the drive in a system that is broken, or it may corrupt the drive, even when you put it back in a working system.

 

[melloa]

I have even wiped them using my FreeNAS system prior to removal and once FreeNAS says wipe complete, they still come up as 1.6TB on any other system.

Have never had this problem and believe me my test box went from ZFS, to ext4, FreeNAS 9, TrueOS, Linux, back to FreeNAS 10 ... just not Windows :D

Install them on a system that you know does support more than 2TiB and use the good gparted to delete whatever is in it and create new partitions.

 

[climb2bhi]

This has been on a system that supports more than 2TB, and not on USB. Drivers are current. The telling thing is that 1.6TB is the same size as the parity partition used with ZFS2 on a 6 drive VDEV. I am pretty sure I have switched it from MBR to GPT and then back again. It never reached 2.2TB only 1.6TB But I will try that again.

I appreciate the good ideas thanks.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

1.6TB is the same size as the parity partition used with ZFS2 on a 6 drive VDEV

What does this mean?

Why would ZFS treat a 4TB disk as a 1.6TB disk, unless there was an obsolete or incompatible piece of hardware involved?

 

[ewhac]

Performed as root. Make absolutely certain you have identified disk_to_wipe correctly, or you will destroy data:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk_to_wipe bs=16M count=16

That will blast the first 256MiB of the disk, which includes the partition table. Afterward, reasonable tools should notice and go, "Oh, this device has no partition table; would you like to create a new one?" and you should be able to see the entire disk after that.

 

[climb2bhi]

ewhac,

Thanks that is a method I have not tried yet.

I will shut down my system and pull all drives so there is no chance of destroying my data and put in one of my old ones. That should make the command read: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=16M count=16 Since it will be the only drive in the system.

 

[saikee]

Quickest way I found is take it to a Linux PC. Use "sudo Parted /dev/sd?" (where ?= the disk designation in Linux) and issue the command "mklabel gpt" inside Parted and then quit.

For some reason the disks created by Freenas could have recognition problem with Gparted and even Windows systems. GPT disk has a partition table at the front and at the rear. Parted is the only one that offers to fix any inconsistency. By making a GPT label it effectively realigns the disk to be a blank one.

I also found Freenas during installation will format every usb flash boot drive with a gpt partition table resulting it objectionable in other operating systems. The cure is using Parted and do a "mklabel msdos" and the usn flash drive will be as good as new. Seems a bit silly to format a little 16GB or 32GB usb flash with a gpt partition table but that is what Freenas does by default.

 

[climb2bhi]

I don't have a Linux PC. I will have to use the FreeNAS System.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

You can boot many flavors of Linux from a live image, e.g. Ubuntu.

 

[climb2bhi]

I will learn about that today. Thanks