Error: Unable to GPT format the disk "ada2"

[SpiritFly]

Hardware: HP Proliant ML310e Gen8 v2
Storage: 2 x 4TB WD in Mirror mode

I'm trying to add a third disk to my freenas. It is an older 1TB Western Digital Green. I want to create a single volume on this one to be used for non-important data. It was used with NTFS (and still has it) but I want to wipe that data out now and format it to ZFS.

Whenever I'm trying to add this disk through the ZFS Volume Manager I get the following error:

Error: Unable to GPT format the disk "ada2"​

Tried wiping out the disk, but it doesn't go through. If I try to wipe it Quick I get this:

Error: Failed to wipe ada2s1: dd: /dev/ada2s1: Operation not permitted​

But if I try to wipe it out by filling zeroes, the progress bar comes up, but nothing happens and it stays like this forever. I know zero filling is a long process, but this seems like it is stuck more. I left it running through the night just to make sure it is actually doing something, but apparently it is not.

I tried googling about it and found some SSH commands for wiping the disks, but that didn't work either.

And what all suggested to do in this case was to take the disk out and zero-fill it through gparted or some other software. I know this is an option, but is a non-convenient one.

So the problem is why doesn't the wipe function work in ZFS? Is it just me or is this a common problem?

 

[cyberjock]

You need to destroy the partitions on the disk. If FreeNAS finds partitions on the disk it won't let you overwrite it to be on the conservative side. Take the disk out and put it in your windows machine and delete all of the existing partitions. Then FreeNAS will let you do what you want.

 

[SpiritFly]

You need to destroy the partitions on the disk. If FreeNAS finds partitions on the disk it won't let you overwrite it to be on the conservative side. Take the disk out and put it in your windows machine and delete all of the existing partitions. Then FreeNAS will let you do what you want.

I hooked up the disk on a windows machine to do just that, but when I opened up disk management the NTFS partition on the disk was already gone and it showed only unallocated space. Not sure what caused this, but it is probably something I did in FreeNAS either the wipe that I left through the night or the shell commands. So I started zero-filling it on that windows machine just to make sure. It's nearly done and I will be hooking it up on FreeNAS again and report. Hope everything will be fine.

 

[Brad Heightman]

This sounds like something that I have going on with my current setup. If I put the disks into my Linux desktop or connect to my Macbook they cannot find the disk. My disk used to be formatted zfs in a previous ZFS on Linux install. Is there a trick I cannot find in google to format the disk with freenas from shell?