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I'm truly stuck here. I'm trying to set up a RAID1 server using Ubuntu 18.04LTS. I think I fouled up one of the SAS drives when installing. I started the install from a USB flash drive and got to the point where I start the manual file system setup. At that time both of my HP 2TB drives were visible.
Here is where my memory gets fuzzy about how I screwed it up. But basically at this point I was jut going through the motions. My server had hardware RAID and this set up was for software RAID.
I think this is what I did,
selected the first drive and made it a boot device
Then on the same device I added a max size partition
then I added a max size partition on the second device
none of these drives were formatted at this time
then I went to set up RAID under the option, software RAID
At this point I cannot fully remember what I did but I remember thinking to myself, wait - I want a hardware RAID not software. So I backed out and rebooted into BIOS to see what my settings were.
Now the drive is almost totally unrecognizable. Fdisk simple ignores it:
Code:
Disk /dev/sdc: 7.48 GiB, 8022654976 bytes, 15669248 sectors
Disk model: USB Flash Disk
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x4601e0ea
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 * 2048 15669247 15667200 7.5G c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Disk /dev/sda: 1.84 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Disk model: MB2000FAMYV
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: C7C8E996-7889-4078-BE8F-AE70A7C9D42B
The Disks utility tool shows the drive with it's serial number but thinks the file size is zero. IT simple says "No Media"
Disks will not let me do anything with that second drive. When I click on the 3 dot icon for the tools they are all greyed out. I cannot format it, partition it, etc...
Anyone have any suggestions for this odd little predicament?
Links to your pictures does not load the pictures...
However, reboot into Live USB mode.
open terminal
sudo fdisk -l
Does that show both drives?
If so (do this only if you want to wipe the drive):
dd if=/dev/zero of/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1000
repeat that command for second drive.
I think I may have fixed the image links. I'm not sure what you mean by reboot into Live USB mode? But I am booted up off of the USB flash drive now and the output for sudo fdisk -l is above and it doesn't recognize the second drive. I did cut out some of the junk so here is the whole thing:
I'd have used hardware raid myself. Boot back to sas card bios and set it up again and try install. It's my opinion that a true hardware raid controller is much better than software md. But you can load md on top of hardware if you want.
Software RAID (mdadm) is better than any cheap hardware RAID for performance, rebuild time, flexibility and management. The only cases where I use hardware RAID are when I need to boot unattended from the RAID drives or when the RAID card has battery backup and the computer is not on a UPS. The boot issue is that some firmware can't be convinced to boot from sdb when sda fails.
I've never seen a cheap hardware raid.
I've seen fake raid cheap.
Hardware raid is still faster and still used by almost every major server install. Once can then use software or other advanced partition systems like LVM/ZFS/Btrfs on top of the array.
I was getting back into this today, still stuck here. I should have talked about the hardware. This is a Dell Poweredge T110. And silly me, it has a PErc controller that won't work in Linux. But that's fine this is just a home server. I still cannot figure out what I could have possible done because like I said when I first started installing Ubuntu I saw both drives perfectly well so it's not the controller.
So at this point the real question is, what could possible happen to a hard disk in a failed installation attempt (say loss of power even)? And are there any tools out there that can be used to force a reformat. Disks at least sees the drive though it thinks it has zero storage space apparently. Fdisk and Gparted don't even recognize the drive.
Unless a drive is damaged as in heads, discs or interface board they can usually be made to work. One exception may be if you use high power emf eraser on some drives where it might erase a chip or two.
Pretty sure PERC boards can be made to work. Some attached pci bridge may need bridge to work first.
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