Hello everyone,
While I am presenting a problem I am also presenting a solution. I am doing this since I found no helpful information on this issue and with a bit of popularity for Microsoft Storage Spaces, I figure this might crop back up and wanted to post what happened, what I learned and what I did to fix the issue.
First off I will start off, I recently used some SSD's in a Storage Spaces Parity pool, I had an issue with the new motherboard so we decided to return the hardware except the SSD's. While I backed up everything off of the Storage Space, I failed to remove the drives from the Storage Space.
While this did not have any issue with the problem at hand, I figured I would share part of the setup, that should help understand how I was working on this issue. (If I had to continually remove drives from one system to another, this could have tried my patience more than it already was and could have ended up taking me days since this server is in a datacenter)
I am using a 2U server with 24 2.5 SAS/SATA trays
I have 12 SSD's installed in the first 12 and no more
I have 64 GB of RAM in the server
I am using the latest vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 6.7 U3) at the time of this
Passthru works great and kept me from having to be onsite to work on this issue :)
VM Specs for the FreeNAS instance:
-18GB of RAM (probably overkill but I was going on the Minimum of 8 plus 1 GB per 1TB of Storage, Please, let me know if I am misunderstanding this) (All RAM Reserved as required when passing through PCI devices)
-20GB Storage on internal mSATA SSD (thin provisioning originally, but I dedicated all 20 GB to it at rebuild since I thought throughout this issue that FreeNAS had cached something internally while had been working on this issue Not worth re-building to re-claim the space now)
- Passthru the Raid Controler with direct access to all 24 bays
To help a little, I was able to grab a screenshot of the FreeNAS Server booting and I did notice the raid name from the storage spaces get picked up when it booted up.
(I did modify the image just to hide part of the Raid name)
I did not think too much of this when I started since I figured that creating the Volume, it would obliterate anything on the disks. How WRONG I was.
I bought more SSD's with the intention of using the ones from the Storage Spaces with it. Upon finally getting everything set up, I finally go to create a Volume with the Volume manager. Only to run into a lovely issue:
Yes, it stopped right in its tracks at the first drive that was in Storage Spaces. I tried to use the built-in erase function of the drives, with the same error on all the drive except of course the different da#
I also tried gpart directly in the shell of FreeNAS and was just greeted with the error of Access Denied or something to that effect. (the same command above)
I am sorry if this seems long, but I want to include as much information to try to help anyone that runs into any of the issues I did
So I start off setting up a Windows VM and installing the latest windows 10 on it to help sort out this issue, so I remove the pass-thru on the FreeNAS and add it to the Windows machine.
Boot it up and go to Disk Management, everything looks awesome here, everything looks empty MBR drives, I format all the drives as NTFS and all seems well, so I delete the partitions and swap back to the FreeNAS with no improvements, I wipe all the drives I am able to, so 8 of the 12 now are empty with no MBR or any records.
Swap back to the Windows machine and try creating a new Storage Spaces pool with only the affected drives, Windows says nothing and creates it with no issue, so I delete the Storage Spaces and Pool and swap back FreeNAS.
Still NO LUCK
Swap back to Windows and take a look using the DiskPart utility, it looks like there are NO partitions on the drives.
So I start using some Partition tools, no need to really list any but 1 that I "thought" was promising.
I create another VM for Linux, storage size does not matter since it was Gparted LiveCD.
I intentionally am listing this one since it SAW something and I was all excited to finally destroy this annoying filesystem type.
It listed the file system on those 4 drives as ATARAID ("ATARAID") [I did that since the search engine did not seem to find anything on this]
there is an option in Gparted to clear drives as clean, I do this for ALL the drives and it does its song and dance and says it worked, YAY right. NO
Once I hit the finish button, it refreshed the drive and it shows back up as ATARAID
I try about a dozen more times and start to pull out my hair.
So now to the solution, I figured that if Microsoft created this issue, Microsoft should be able to fix it right?
Yup, I went to the DiskPart utility and used the CLEAN utility part of it, so I selected each drive
Select drive 9
Clean
Select drive 10
Clean
so on and so forth
all while in disk part of course
This finally works and I can finally get to work. I do hope this helps someone out there since I was unable to find any information on this I tried to be as detailed as possible. If anyone wants to clean this up and make it look better, by all means, please do so, also share this with other places that you thing would benefit from this. I posted here since I specifically had the issue here, but I am sure there may be other times someone might be trying to clear drives from a Storage Space with no luck.
To the Moderator, if I posted this in the wrong section I apologize, please move it for me.
P.S. ANYONE that does experience this issue, I think it would be helpful for a complete screenshot of the error that FreeNAS was spitting out when trying to create the Volume or erase the drive(s).
While I am presenting a problem I am also presenting a solution. I am doing this since I found no helpful information on this issue and with a bit of popularity for Microsoft Storage Spaces, I figure this might crop back up and wanted to post what happened, what I learned and what I did to fix the issue.
First off I will start off, I recently used some SSD's in a Storage Spaces Parity pool, I had an issue with the new motherboard so we decided to return the hardware except the SSD's. While I backed up everything off of the Storage Space, I failed to remove the drives from the Storage Space.
While this did not have any issue with the problem at hand, I figured I would share part of the setup, that should help understand how I was working on this issue. (If I had to continually remove drives from one system to another, this could have tried my patience more than it already was and could have ended up taking me days since this server is in a datacenter)
I am using a 2U server with 24 2.5 SAS/SATA trays
I have 12 SSD's installed in the first 12 and no more
I have 64 GB of RAM in the server
I am using the latest vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 6.7 U3) at the time of this
Passthru works great and kept me from having to be onsite to work on this issue :)
VM Specs for the FreeNAS instance:
-18GB of RAM (probably overkill but I was going on the Minimum of 8 plus 1 GB per 1TB of Storage, Please, let me know if I am misunderstanding this) (All RAM Reserved as required when passing through PCI devices)
-20GB Storage on internal mSATA SSD (thin provisioning originally, but I dedicated all 20 GB to it at rebuild since I thought throughout this issue that FreeNAS had cached something internally while had been working on this issue Not worth re-building to re-claim the space now)
- Passthru the Raid Controler with direct access to all 24 bays
To help a little, I was able to grab a screenshot of the FreeNAS Server booting and I did notice the raid name from the storage spaces get picked up when it booted up.
(I did modify the image just to hide part of the Raid name)
I did not think too much of this when I started since I figured that creating the Volume, it would obliterate anything on the disks. How WRONG I was.
I bought more SSD's with the intention of using the ones from the Storage Spaces with it. Upon finally getting everything set up, I finally go to create a Volume with the Volume manager. Only to run into a lovely issue:
Code:
[MiddlewareError: Disk wipe job failed: Command '('gpart', 'create', '-s', 'gpt', '/dev/da9')' returned non-zero exit status 1.]Yes, it stopped right in its tracks at the first drive that was in Storage Spaces. I tried to use the built-in erase function of the drives, with the same error on all the drive except of course the different da#
I also tried gpart directly in the shell of FreeNAS and was just greeted with the error of Access Denied or something to that effect. (the same command above)
Code:
gpart create -s gpt /dev/da9
I am sorry if this seems long, but I want to include as much information to try to help anyone that runs into any of the issues I did
So I start off setting up a Windows VM and installing the latest windows 10 on it to help sort out this issue, so I remove the pass-thru on the FreeNAS and add it to the Windows machine.
Boot it up and go to Disk Management, everything looks awesome here, everything looks empty MBR drives, I format all the drives as NTFS and all seems well, so I delete the partitions and swap back to the FreeNAS with no improvements, I wipe all the drives I am able to, so 8 of the 12 now are empty with no MBR or any records.
Swap back to the Windows machine and try creating a new Storage Spaces pool with only the affected drives, Windows says nothing and creates it with no issue, so I delete the Storage Spaces and Pool and swap back FreeNAS.
Still NO LUCK
Swap back to Windows and take a look using the DiskPart utility, it looks like there are NO partitions on the drives.
So I start using some Partition tools, no need to really list any but 1 that I "thought" was promising.
I create another VM for Linux, storage size does not matter since it was Gparted LiveCD.
I intentionally am listing this one since it SAW something and I was all excited to finally destroy this annoying filesystem type.
It listed the file system on those 4 drives as ATARAID ("ATARAID") [I did that since the search engine did not seem to find anything on this]
there is an option in Gparted to clear drives as clean, I do this for ALL the drives and it does its song and dance and says it worked, YAY right. NO
Once I hit the finish button, it refreshed the drive and it shows back up as ATARAID
I try about a dozen more times and start to pull out my hair.
So now to the solution, I figured that if Microsoft created this issue, Microsoft should be able to fix it right?
Yup, I went to the DiskPart utility and used the CLEAN utility part of it, so I selected each drive
Select drive 9
Clean
Select drive 10
Clean
so on and so forth
all while in disk part of course
This finally works and I can finally get to work. I do hope this helps someone out there since I was unable to find any information on this I tried to be as detailed as possible. If anyone wants to clean this up and make it look better, by all means, please do so, also share this with other places that you thing would benefit from this. I posted here since I specifically had the issue here, but I am sure there may be other times someone might be trying to clear drives from a Storage Space with no luck.
To the Moderator, if I posted this in the wrong section I apologize, please move it for me.
P.S. ANYONE that does experience this issue, I think it would be helpful for a complete screenshot of the error that FreeNAS was spitting out when trying to create the Volume or erase the drive(s).
