SATA Drive Issues in GUI

[dansermino]

I have just installed freeNAS 9.2.1.5 on a USB stick and am running it through an older 'ex-Windows XP' box. I am having issues with my SATA attached hard disks not showing up in the GUI. My motherboard and freeNAS recognize the drives on startup but only my USB hard drives will appear within the GUI. I have tried 3 different HDDs and SATA cables, and used gParted to first remove the previous volumes on each. All the drives load up on the same machine through Ubuntu and work fine. Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[Ericloewe]

First of all, let me remind you that an older "ex-Windows XP box" is nowhere near adequate to run FreeNAS.

Without further hardware information, there's nothing useful we can suggest.

 

[dansermino]

Please forgive me. I am currently running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200 with 4gb RAM(plans to upgrade). I've had difficulty finding out much about my on board disk controller through HP or Ubuntu, other than its SATA 3gB/s. I've been trying attach a Western Digital Blue (WD1600AAJS) 160gB, a brand new Seagate Barracuda (generation 7200.12) 500gB, and an old Hitachi Deckstar (T7K250) 160gB. Been attaching through SATA0 and SATA1.

 

[Ericloewe]

Is it configured as AHCI in the BIOS? Is the chipset listed as supported in FreeBSD 9.2's hardware guide?

Honestly, even if you get it to work, it's a terrible setup. You need 8GB of RAM, minimum, to avoid data loss and you need ECC. Additionally, performance will most likely be horrible with an Athlon 64.

 

[joeschmuck]

Have these drives ever been used in a RAID or other NAS? If so you may need to erase the first part of the drive. I don't recall how much you would need to erase but 100MB I think would be overkill so give this a thought. I'm headed out on a work related trip for the next week so someone else will need to offer advice.

As for your hardware, providing you are using it for testing purposes I think you will be fine however 4GB of RAM can give you issues. I say can because some folks can make it work and many can't. If you try to get advice for troubleshooting you are likely to not get much help. If you roll back to FreeNAS 8.2.x then 4GB RAM should be fine but it's right on the edge, but again if it's for testing then you are fine.

 

[solarisguy]

In the GUI open Shell and then in the shell window execute commands:
dmesg | grep -i ata
Copy here the output. (If you did perform reboots, the lines would repeat, just gives us the bottom unique set.)

Afterwards please execute in the shell window
smartctl --scan
and copy and paste that result (based on your description that one would be empty).

 

[cyberjock]

The real command to run is camcontrol devlist. ;)

 

[solarisguy]

@cyberjock, I am expecting camcontrol devlist to just return the devices connected using USB

 

[cyberjock]

I agree. But camcontrol devlist is several steps closer to the hardware than smartctl --scan(unless I'm mistaken anyway).

dmesg with ata is also likely to be useless as hardware that isn't supported won't be listed most of the time. A complete dmesg may list the PCI address for the hardware and then mention that no driver is attached.

My problem with this thread as a whole is 2 fold...

1. Since the box has <8GB of RAM there can be weird random problems.
2. The OP has failed to include his/her hardware list as requested by the forum posting guidelines.

While the OP said that he proved it works in Ubuntu and Windows that doesn't say much for being supported in FreeBSD. My guess is that his problem is that the SATA chipset is incompatible with FreeBSD. 99% of the time if it doesn't work "out of the box" its because the SATA controller isn't supported.

 

[solarisguy]

To dansermino, we might be able to offer you some advice, only after we have more information about your hardware. You wrote that you were seeing your disks during the FreeNAS boot sequence, command dmesg would display messages from the boot sequence back inside the shell window.

 

[KempelofDoom]

A quick and dirty way to clear those disks would be to load them up using a live linux distro and running the following.

shred -vz -n 0 /dev/sd# - where # is replaced by the actual disk's number. You can find that in gparted or if tree is installed, tree /dev/disk, usually, you would let it run for a minute or so and then ctrl+c to quit and then repeat for the others. That's how I quickly "wipe" a drive that I'm using for testing. Normally, you'd use different settings if you wanted to properly "wipe" the drive.

The model number of your mobo would help everyone here with troubleshooting.

 

[solarisguy]

@KempelofDoom, if that was the issue, then zpool labelclear -f /dev/ada0, then the same for ada1 etc., would be enough. And could have been accomplished from the FreeNAS shell window.