Startup Storage difficulty

[David Henrickson]

Hello everyone!

I wanted to say thank you to the volunteers that have the "know all" to help us whom do not have that. Awesome! With that said...I have an issue

I purchased (4) 4TB hard drives. I did it in batches of 2. I installed the first 2 drives just to test out the system. Learn it and whatnot. I found out they have 520 sector allocation, so changing that to 512 has proven VERY difficult so far, as I do not have an operating system that can do that conversion. Anyway, I typed in a few codes I found regarding sg_format in the SHELL on Freenas to learn what the drive is and then all of a sudden POOF, one of my two hard drives is just not showing up anymore. It was da0, now the only drive that shows up is da1.

I received the next two hard drives in the mail today (512 sector) in hopes of at least starting ONE volume so that I can get freenas up and running while I work on the missing one. I installed them and now I still only have 3 hard drives showing up. One showing 4.1TB (the 520 sector hard drive) and two at 4TB. Still missing the one hard drive. Green light on the server, btw (T610 with H200), so I know the server has to see it. Ideas? Suggestions? well....actually on any of my issues? lol

The help would be much appreciated. I tried to install the 2 new ones on a volume by themselves today, and to my best luck received yet another error that they could not be done. Currently formatting them with all zeros (which the 520 sector HDD did NOT let me start). Hoping that will fix that. Side note 34....I also bought the H200 off of eBay and I am not 100% sure it is flashed to IT mode....is there a way to tell? I cannot setup a THING on the H200 in the BIOS when I hit ctrl-C at startup, so I was "assuming" (yep, I'm apparently an ass) that it was already flashed. struggling guys....I just want it to work so that i can convince my wife to get off of the Comcast teet.

 

[8-bit Yoda]

Did you read the post below?

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-use-drives-with-abnormal-sector-sizes.51245/

 

[David Henrickson]

Ha! I have not! I searched, but must have skipped over that one somehow. Way to go! I'll read it and get back to this posting for my conclusion...or potentially additional help. Thank you!

Though, that still won't help the hard drive the FreeNAS has decided to not show up....and since it doesn't show up, I cannot camcontrol it to set the new sector size of the NetAPP Hard Drive to 512 from 520. Suggestions there?

 

[BigDave]

I also bought the H200 off of eBay and I am not 100% sure it is flashed to IT mode....is there a way to tell?

I would run the sas2flash.efi utility (if your hardware supports it's use) and just type the command sas2flash list

 

[BigDave]

(if your hardware supports it's use)

You would have to boot your motherboard to the uefi shell to run the sas2flash.efi utility.

 

[8-bit Yoda]

Also, can you list the rest of your hardware? Have you tried to plugin the HDD directly into the SATA ports of your motherboard instead of using the HBA?

 

[David Henrickson]

Hello Guys,

Sorry its been awhile, as I am normally very busy throughout the week at work. However, I will list the hardware I have for it:

Dual E5520 Xeon 2.26Ghz CPUs with 8MB Cache and HT
16GB of DDR3 ECC RAM
Dual NICs
iDRAC 6 Enterprise (separate NIC)
(4) 4TB hard drives (issue's I'm currently having)
Bought one Dell SAS cable and one aftermarket. Aftermarket still triggered error until I turned it around and now it show's that it works; however, I am not in a constant "initializing controller" loop so it will now not boot into FreeNAS. Awesome....

Anything else you'd need to know? I downloaded FreeNAS 11.1 and was using that until this "loop" triggered.

 

[danb35]

sas2flash.efi utility (if your hardware supports it's use)

...or just use the version of sas2flash that ships with FreeNAS. But the command would be sas2flash -listall.

 

[David Henrickson]

Can I use the SAS2Flash utility in FreeNAS to convert my H200 to IT mode if it isn't yet or no then?

I still have to be able to LOG INTO FreeNAS. I'm still in a loop. I will try to unplug my "cable A" and make it skip that error. I didn't have issues then, but I still will need to get that cable to work before I can fully use the server the way I had intended.....not to mention convert my 520 hard drive to the required 512 sectors.

 

[danb35]

Can I use the SAS2Flash utility in FreeNAS to convert my H200 to IT mode if it isn't yet or no then?

You can use the FreeBSD version for anything you could use the DOS or EFI versions for.

 

[David Henrickson]

And this was solved. Thank you all. I finally figured it out. Took the plunge and said screw it and luckily I did everything right!