Error: Unable to GPT format the disk "ada1"

[peterbata]

I have been at this for hours. Totally ridiculous. I had previously prepared my two HDD's via "Volume Manager" a few days ago after having performed a fresh install of FreeNas version 8.x. I have FreeNas installed on a smaller 20gig drive.

Today I decided to perform a fresh install of FreeNAS-8.3.0-BETA2-x86 (r12276). I am unable to use my two HDD's. I see both disks when selecting "View Discs" (ada1/ada2) but am unable to create new volumes.

The error I get is: Error: Unable to GPT format the disk "ada1". Wiping the drive does not help. And being new to both FreeNas and linux, I am unable to format / delete partitions, etc...

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you


Peter

 

[ben]

What kind of wipe did you do? Are the disks just dumb platters, or do they have some kind of special "security" features or the like?

 

[peterbata]

View Disks / Wipe / Quick and Full with Zeros. Full with Zeros gave me this error message:

Error: Failed to wipe ada1: dd: /dev/ada1: Operation not permitted


Nothing special about the drives. Actually, they are a few years old. Keep in mind that I had previously created the two volumes and was able to create mapped drives to those disks in Windows 7. In fact, I had copy / pasted some random Word and PDF docs. Everything appeared to be working properly at some point. By the way, I appreciate your reply.

What kind of wipe did you do? Are the disks just dumb platters, or do they have some kind of special "security" features or the like?

 

[ben]

How big are the disks, was the previous usage of them on the same motherboard as you're using for FreeNAS? For that matter, how old is the motherboard?

 

[peterbata]

Here is some info on the system that I am using:

Sys Info


The motherboard is a few years old for sure and is an Asus Model No: P5PE-VM with 1 gig of ram

I believe that the HDD are 80 and 120 gig SATA

How big are the disks, was the previous usage of them on the same motherboard as you're using for FreeNAS? For that matter, how old is the motherboard?

 

[ben]

Are you trying to create UFS or ZFS volumes? If it's ZFS, I strongly recommend UFS instead, with that hardware. Either way, if you've only tried one, give the other a shot. Also, post the output from 'tail /var/log/messages' immediately after trying to create the volumes.

 

[peterbata]

Here are the results of tail /var/log/messages for both ada1 and ada2. I have always selected UFS

Are you trying to create UFS or ZFS volumes? If it's ZFS, I strongly recommend UFS instead, with that hardware. Either way, if you've only tried one, give the other a shot. Also, post the output from 'tail /var/log/messages' immediately after trying to create the volumes.

 

[ben]

Did this happen between 8.2 and 8.3? Like, when you were able to format the disks before, was that ONLY windows, or was it this hardware with FreeNAS 8.2? Or has this hardware not ever been able to make FreeNAS volumes?

 

[peterbata]

Before the fresh install of version 8.3 I was successful in creating a volume for each of the HDD's wg. nas1 and nas2. And as I stated in an earlier post was able to copy / paste some random documents to those volumes. Well, well, well. What do you know. A few minutes before receiving your post I gave this a whirl (another post I found after googling the error message) and Voila look at the pic.

Did this happen between 8.2 and 8.3? Like, when you were able to format the disks before, was that ONLY windows, or was it this hardware with FreeNAS 8.2? Or has this hardware not ever been able to make FreeNAS volumes?

 

[ben]

Weird. you might want to run those drives through some disk diagnostics to make sure they're not about to die (from the sizes they sound pretty old).

Best of luck to you.

 

[peterbata]

It is very odd because I do not remember setting mirrored drives. In any case, I would like to thank you immensely for coming to my aid. Every step was a learning experience. And yes, the drives have been kicking around for a while. This is definitely not a setup that I would trust with important data. Merely for educational purpose you might say. Have a wonderful evening. Peter

One last thing. I should have given props to the individual whose original post came to my rescue. Post #5

http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...-Unable-to-GPT-format-the-disk-quot-ada0-quot

Weird. you might want to run those drives through some disk diagnostics to make sure they're not about to die (from the sizes they sound pretty old).

Best of luck to you.