SOLVED 'Add Volume' button doesn't do anything

[RoadHazard]

I've just installed and booted FreeNAS for the first time. It works just like the documentation describes. Hooray!

Section 8.1.1. of the online documentation describes how to create my first storage volume. That goes as planned, except when I click the big blue 'Add Volume / Existing data will be cleared' button. Instead of waiting the expected minutes/hours, it immediately refreshes my screen and shows no volumes created. Everything looks exactly as it did before.

Background: I have six HDDs in the system (plus a smaller seventh disk that's not involved here), all the same size, and all have been used before in a FreeBSD system. In other words, they're not virgin blank disks, FWIW.
- I type a name for the volume
- I click the little blue + button to add all six disks at once
- I leave the little silver slider alone.
- I select RAIDZ from the drop-down list. (Yes, I know RAIDZ2 would give better redundancy but I'd rather have the extra storage space.)
- I click the Add Volume button and almost immediately the browser refreshes with no changes.

Please ridicule me. What am I doing wrong to prevent Volume Manager from creating and showing a volume?

 

[danb35]

At first guess, I'd say you're encountering one of the safety features of FreeNAS--it won't generally create a volume on top of a disk that's been used before. I don't know if there's a way to bypass that inside FreeNAS (I'm not aware of one), but properly wiping the disk will definitely work. DBAN is commonly recommended for this task.

 

[RoadHazard]

Thanks for the tip. I've started running DBAN, but even in quick mode it says it'll take 5+ hours to wipe the first disk. And I've got six disks. And DBAN doesn't have a ^C or 'stop' option that I can see. Yuck. I don't even really want to wipe the disks at all. It's my own data, fer crissakes.

Edit: What I may do is run DBAN for a few minutes on each disk, reboot, and run it for a few minutes on the next disk, etc. We'll see if that satisfies FreeNAS...

 

[depasseg]

I've exported a pool (but not destroyed the data), and then immediately created a new pool right over the old disks. I don't think it's a safety feature.

 

[gpsguy]

You should have been able to mark each disk with the spacebar and down arrow, then choose the quick option. It should work on them concurrently.

There's a faster way of doing it, by doing a dd command on the beginning and end of the disks. Unfortunately, I don't have that memorized. DBAN is slow, but works.

 

[adrianwi]

Does it work if you try using Manual Setup in the GUI? I had a problem adding a disk to a stripe using the Volume Manager (it didn't want me to create a non-recommended pool) but it worked clicking the Manual Setup button in the bottom right corner.

 

[depasseg]

Were the drives ever used with a Hardware RAID controller?

 

[RoadHazard]

Does it work if you try using Manual Setup in the GUI? I had a problem adding a disk to a stripe using the Volume Manager (it didn't want me to create a non-recommended pool) but it worked clicking the Manual Setup button in the bottom right corner.

No, FreeNAS's manual setup option give me the same result. I selected all six disks and filled in the other options, and still got the quick screen refresh with no actual work done.

 

[RoadHazard]

Were the drives ever used with a Hardware RAID controller?

Yup, but that was some time ago. They were not RAID-ed (either in hardware or in software) immediately before I installed FreeNAS, however. Just six independent drives.

 

[RoadHazard]

Here's something I hadn't noticed before. When it fails, I get a quick green popup message Error: Unable to GPT format the disk "ada1."

Does that give us any extra clues?

 

[depasseg]

Delete the partitions on the drives and then retry the volume creation.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?posts/242332/

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Unable to GPT format the disk "ada1."
Does that give us any extra clues?

It confirms that the issue is that at least one of the drives isn't blank.

One option is to run badblocks on the drives in destructive write mode. This tests them and wipes them at the same time. The downside is that it's four read/write passes, which takes ages, but you can always kill it part way through if you can't stand to wait.

 

[solarisguy]

Although dd and DBAN might solve it for you, the ZFS way of doing things is
zpool labelclear
see http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=zpool
Additionally, I am finding that more convenient than either dd or DBAN.

The above assumes the hard drives do not have any special RAID configuration on them.

Do zpool labelclear on all the disk you intend to use in your pool.

 

[RoadHazard]

Success! Wiping all six drive with DBAN did the trick. I don't think I would've thought of that on my own. Thanks, guys.

 

[RoadHazard]

Although dd and DBAN might solve it for you, the ZFS way of doing things is
zpool labelclear
see http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=zpool
Additionally, I am finding that more convenient than either dd or DBAN.

The above assumes the hard drives do not have any special RAID configuration on them.

Do zpool labelclear on all the disk you intend to use in your pool.

Oops, too late. But I'll remember that for next time.