Accidentally installed FreeNAS on 2TB Data drive now it shows as 16 GB drive in FreeNAS

[tording99z28]

Hey guys. I was doing a fresh install of FreeNAS on my system and when I was going through the install onto my flash drive I accidentally installed FreeNAS on one of my WD 2TB data drives. Now I am in my new installation of FreeNAS and when I go to Storage --> View Disks instead of showing two 2TB drives ada1 and ada2 I now have an ada1 and a da0 and the da0 is only 16.4 GB in size instead of 2 TB. How do I fix this and get my second 2 TB drive back? Thanks in advance.

 

[Ericloewe]

Wipe the drive, say with DBAN.

 

[tording99z28]

I am unfamiliar with this software, could you give me a quick overview of what to do?

 

[cyberjock]

I am unfamiliar with this software, could you give me a quick overview of what to do?

That's not a question that should be answered in the FreeNAS forums. We're simply recommending a software program, we don't support it here. Please see whatever DBAN support structure exists for how to use it, or use Google.

 

[tording99z28]

I understand that but as I am running it on FreeNAS I am sure someone has done this before or knows how to do it and could help me out with it? FreeNAS has no built in ability to format drives or partitions?

 

[gpsguy]

FreeNAS generally expects to find that your drives are blank (new/unformatted). If it blindly allowed you to zap hard disks - users would be here complaining that they accidentally wiped the wrong disk in a striped volume (akin to RAID0).

While one could wipe the beginning and the end of the drive with dd (I don't have the syntax memorized), DBAN (www.dban.org) will let you do it via a GUI.

Download the ISO, burn the image to a CD, boot from the image. When it comes up, select your hard disk and run the quick erase. Some of the other options might take many hours/days. You might want to disconnect any other drives in your system when you run this utility, so you don't accidentally run it on the wrong drive.

btw, I always mark these CD's as "DANGEROUS" so I don't accidentally use them in the future. I've even been known to run them through the "paper" shredder, just to ensure I don't reuse the disk.

 

[tording99z28]

Thanks for the info. I got it downloaded and burned to CD and loaded into my machine. I got it to boot from CD and when it comes up it says to hit enter to boot into the interactive mode and when I do I get nothing. Nothing happens and it does not go any farther. I burned a second CD just to see if it was a corrupt burn but second CD did the same exact thing.

 

[gpsguy]

Did you download DBAN or Blancco? DBAN's all you need.

It looks like they've changed their website recently - Blancco wasn't there the last time I checked.

You might want to try downloading a (earlier) version from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/files/dban/

I've been using the program for (10?) years, without any issues.

 

[esamett]

http://gparted.org/
dban didn't work for me - noob
or you can wipe disk with drive utility from disk vendor

 

[cyberjock]

One thing I find weird is that FreeNAS shouldn't make a disk look like 16GB. 2GB, yes. But not 16GB. Can you post the output of smartctl -a /dev/XXX for your disk?