USB Drive to SATA

[mkku]

Hello there!

 

Previously I was using 7x 4TB external USB drives in unraid (to test it out).

After finally deciding to move to a proper NAS, I bought a case that has enough space to fit those drives internally (SATA).

 

Now onto my problem:

unraid doesn't recognize those drives without the external enclosure. (Even with a new config, due to id changes).

This is not due to some sort of encryption of the drive, I sampled a few hundred megabytes of the drive in the enclosure (USB) and attached via SATA with "dd" and compared the output - exactly the same.

After some digging I succeeded in nailing it down to the following thing:

The size of the logical sectors is reported differently: 512 (SATA) instead of 4096 (USB). This resultsin the parition table being broken.

I then decided to do the following on the drive to fix the partition table:

- Backup the first few megabytes of the drive in case something goes wrong

- Attach the drive to a ubuntu system, that has "parted" installed

- (parted) mklabel

  - Type: gpt

- (parted) rescue

  - This searches for partition, it found one (only one - spanning the full drive), and updates the partition table accordingly.

 

Now the partition table should be fixed, right?

Yes and No, I now can mount the drive using Unassigned Drives. However, I can not use the drive in the array: "Unsupported partition layout"

Apparently for the use in unraid the partition has to start at a certain position (64), which now is probably off

 

Is there any way to somehow fix this, or do I have to transfer 28TB worth of data onto clean drives and start from scratch?

Edited March 2, 2021 by mkku
Additional info (sector size)

[JorgeB]

55 minutes ago, mkku said:

or do I have to transfer 28TB worth of data onto clean drives and start from scratch?

That's your best option.