Recycled disks not useable.

[gkroezinga]

Hello

I took some drives out of my old NAS to use them in my new FreeNAS setup.
During boot I keep seeing my old RAID5 array name popping up.
I cant create a ZFS volume while the system still wants to use the RAID5.
I cant find it in the web interface and I am not able to delete it via the command line using the graid5 command.

Can anyone be of any assistance?

 

[BigDave]

I cant find it in the web interface

by IT you mean the old raid5 array is not appearing in the GUI.
Also, please tell which version of Freenas you are running.

 

[gpsguy]

In addition to what @BigDave said, what were your running on your old NAS? Was it hardware RAID?

You might want to try booting from DBAN (www.dban.org) and see if you can run a quick erase on them. If so, you'll be able to re-use them in FreeNAS.

 

[gkroezinga]

My version of freenas is the last one. 9.2.1.7

Indeed BigDave, the array doesnt appear in the GUI.

The old nas ran NAS4Free, it was indeed on software raid: GEOM_RAID5

I will try DBAN...

 

[Knowltey]

Push come to shove do you have the ability to stick them back in the old NAS and delete their RAID configuration that way?

 

[jgreco]

DBAN will take care of it nicely. Suggest also filing a bug report to prompt the devs to think about this sort of thing. Our local FreeBSD system build script has to cope with similar issues and it is not always trivial.

 

[cyberjock]

The devs know about this problem. There's 2 issues:

1. In some cases, the data on the drive will cause the scripts that setup the partitions to result in a kernel panic. (whoops) This is due to the "invalid" data that the drives.
2. FreeNAS doesn't just overwrite the data flat-out because there were too many problems with people overwriting disks that had data. So FreeNAS will not let you repartition a disk if there is a partition table (or even something resembling a partition table). These people usually hook up 6 disks, assume their data is on da5, then accidentally repartition and reformat the wrong drive.

Yes, this makes extra work for some, but it's a choice between inconveniencing a few people that are reusing disks and inconveniencing many more because they just formatted the disk with their data.

It's the lesser of two evils. :(

 

[gkroezinga]

Well software that needs this level of knowledge to set it up in the first place should have an option to wipe any drive and use any drive. At least, thats my opinion.
It just took me a day of wiping 5 drives....
This little option could have saved me a lot of time.

 

[joeschmuck]

As for time savings, this topic on using old drives has been discussed a lot and you need not spend all day wiping out the entire drive, just deleting the first and last group of sectors typically makes the disk look unused.

But it looks like you got the job done in either case.

 

[gkroezinga]

Well the drives are 2 months old... So "old" is relative here...

 

[joeschmuck]

Well the drives are 2 months old... So "old" is relative here...

Doesn't matter the physical age of the drives, they came out of your "old NAS" (your words) so they had some format on them. The idea is to delete the unique format information, not all the data on the drive, and then quickly make it useful. Like I said, you got there either way but chock it up as a learning experience in case you ever go through this again. There are tools out there that allow you to wipe portions for a drive, including FreeNAS but it's a manual operation and well worth looking up, just gotta have caution if you have other drives installed with data as you could cause damage to a drive unintentionally if not careful.

 

[cyberjock]

It doesn't matter how long you had them for. What matters is if they appear to have a partition table. MBRs only store in the beginning of the drive, but GPT stores at the beginning and end of the disk.

I guarantee you that if you had been one of those folks that lost a bunch of irreplacable data because the OS let you overwrite the old partition table you'd argue the other side of the story.

While a little inconvenient to start, it's not the end of the world. FreeNAS is an "appliance" and so there are many things that are limited in what you can and can't do with it. It's not meant to be as universally powerful as FreeBSD, and has many "seat belts" to prevent you from doing things that might be very very stupid. Of course these 'seat belts' often limit features that are available and such, but that's life.

As I've had to tell quite a few people, it's a situation where you'll have to accept some of the limitations or go with something else. FreeNAS isn't for everyone and nobody here gets offended if FreeNAS isn't for you. Search the forums and you'll find plenty of people don't want to use FreeNAS just because they don't want to buy adequate hardware. ;)

 

[gpsguy]

My guess, is that you didn't select the "quick erase" option, as I suggested.

Yes, as @joeschmuck said, there are some "dd" commands that you probably could have used to accomplish the same thing. But, *I* don't have those commands memorized. Had you done a forum search (suggested in the stickies) before you posted the message, you might have found that information.

It just took me a day of wiping 5 drives....

 

[gkroezinga]

Well I tried to erase the first few megabites on the drives with dd. The drives were still recognised as a RAID5 array.

The quick option in DBAN is not very quick... It will write the entire drive with zeros. That takes quite some time on a 2 TB drive.

By the way, I ended up with a very nice NAS using FreeNAS. Not a bad word about it!
So in the end very happy!
Thanks all for the help.