Unable to Create Volume

[CharlieBravo55516]

Good afternoon All,
Problem Description:
When I try to create a volume, either manually or through the wizard, the Create Volume window closes without any sort of message (error or success) and no volumes are visible in "View Volumes".
Example:
Click Volume Manager
1. Revert to Manual Setup
2. Name the volume
3. Select disks - there are 4 disks visible, ada0,1,2,3
4. Select all disks and select RAID-Z2 (for example)
5. Click Add volume
6. Progress bar briefly appears, then disappears and you're on Storage --> Volumes, with no Volume.

I've scanned for existing forums and not been able to find a solution.
Debug file is attached.

Hardware is:
1. HP ML150 G6
2. Intel Xeon E5502 @ 1.87GHz (single processor)
3. 8GB Kingston
4. 4x 1TB Western Digital - AHCI enabled in BIOS. Each drive connected directly to motherboard with 1 SATA cable each. I had deleted, quick formatted and then deleted each drive's volume in Win8 x64 prior to installation into the ML150 chassis.
5. No add-on cards.
6. On-board LAN.
7. FreeNAS 9.3-STABLE-201505130355 is installed onto an 8GB USB stick which is connected via the on-board USB port. It was installed via a bootable DVD created by downloading the ISO from the site.

Device requirements: I want to create an iSCSI target for use by a VMWare ESXi 6 host. This is not for a live environment - only for the creation of VM's for testing purposes.


[root@freenas ~]# gpart show
=> 34 15187901 da0 GPT (7.2G)
34 1024 1 bios-boot (512k)
1058 6 - free - (3.0k)
1064 15185920 2 freebsd-zfs (7.2G)
15186984 951 - free - (475k)

=> 63 1953253313 raid/r0 MBR (931G)
63 1953253313 - free - (931G)

=> 63 1953253313 raid/r128 MBR (931G)
63 1953253313 - free - (931G)

=> 63 1953253313 raid/r1 MBR (931G)
63 1953253313 - free - (931G)

Other info:
I used the same iso to create a FreeNAS Virtual Machine (ESXi 5.1) and succesfully created an iSCSI target without issue - so I added a 20GB hard drive, created a volume and configured the iSCSI components.

I hope I managed to get all the required info here, so I look forward to any advice that you may have, thank you.

 

[CharlieBravo55516]

Quick update: I am now running DBAN on each of the 4 1TB WD drives. They were originally in a production environment configured in a RAID1 set on an Adaptec RAID card. Just wondering if this may be the cause. Will find out next week.

 

[danb35]

That could well be the cause, though I'd still expect an error message. FreeNAS really doesn't like to overwrite used disks if it can tell there's something on them.

 

[DrKK]

I suspect the problem is an old partition table. Very often, the ZFS formatting will fail if an old partition table is on there. You can wipe it out by doing a short first sectors overwrite with dd, or whatever other method you have at your disposal for wiping the drive.

 

[CharlieBravo55516]

Looking much better now.
Left the server running DBAN over the weekend and after a reboot and into FreeNAS, the problem now was that FreeNAS was not detecting the 4 1TB WD's drives.
So, I rebooted again with the FreeNAS DVD in the drive bay and used it to do a fresh install on the USB drive attached to the mainboard. After the fresh installation and a reboot, logged into FreeNAS console and there were the 4 drives. Onto Volume Manager and after the first attempt, I have a volume. Problem solved.

Thank you to all who took the time to read and to Danb35 and DrKK for responding!