Unable to format disk

[weymouthba]

Got a few things for you to try in order to try an isolate the problem and a few questions as well...

1) You have never told us which version of FreeNAS you are using, so what is it?
2) Can you move the hard drive to another bay and try again?
3) Looks like you have four 300GB drives, two of which have zero free. Can you explain that?
4) Create a FreeBSD 10.3 VM and try that drive again. You already know other OS's seem to work, is it FreeNAS or FreeBSD?
5) What is the hard drive models for the failed and good drives?

Sorry for the delay, it's been a busy weekend. I have the FreeBSD 10.3 VM up and running with the HBA attached. I'm having trouble identifying the disk I am trying to wipe, here is the output of gpart status:

You have one very odd problem because it appears you might have one problem dealing with the fact that the drive doesn't want to take certain commands from FreeNAS, and the second is it doesn't appear to be clearing the GPT.

One other thing to try is to run BadBlocks on the drive using the -w option (destructive test) and I'd use Ubuntu since you know that works and just see what happens. This will certainly clear the drive of all data and test the drive out at the same time.

I'm still curious if the FreeBSD 10.3 VM works or fails.

I'll try this, thanks.

EDIT: when running the badblocks command I get the following error:

permission denied while trying to determine device size

 

[joeschmuck]

EDIT: when running the badblocks command I get the following error:

permission denied while trying to determine device size

You get this while running under Ubuntu VM?

Maybe the HBA or ESXi is giving you problems. You should just boot straight to an Ubuntu Live CD (ISO image if you have IPMI) and give it a shot. I'd unplug all the hard drives you want to retain data on that way it's easy to identify the hard drive. Right now because I have no idea how you have ESXi configured, we can't rule that out as the issue.

Good Luck.

 

[weymouthba]

You get this while running under Ubuntu VM?

Maybe the HBA or ESXi is giving you problems. You should just boot straight to an Ubuntu Live CD (ISO image if you have IPMI) and give it a shot. I'd unplug all the hard drives you want to retain data on that way it's easy to identify the hard drive. Right now because I have no idea how you have ESXi configured, we can't rule that out as the issue.

Good Luck.

No, that error is within the FreeBSD VM. I will remove the other drives and go from there.

 

[joeschmuck]

I still think you should remove all the drives you want to retain with data, install FreeNAS directly to the metal machine, No ESXi, and see how things work. I suspect that it will work fine.

Once done with that, I'd run to the VMware forums for ESXi and start asking for help with why you cannot get Direct Path I/O to work properly for FreeBSD. Stick with the FreeBSD OS since it was failing as well. Once you find a solution fro FreeBSD, odds are it's the same for FreeNAS. I don't see this issue as a FreeNAS programming failure. The VMware forums will be able to give you much better help.