6.10.3 - Drive serial/ID storage location - How to wipe a drive before adding it to unraid (again)

[djtodd]

OK, did a bit of a hardware swap, put the contents of my unraid server in a Rosewill server case.

My drives were controlled by an Adaptec 8805 in HBA mode, but when I booted it up there were tonnes of errors. Checked all of the cables, reseated everything, same deal.

 

I had 9 drives, 2 parity and 7 data. So I just plugged 8 of them into the SATA ports on my x570 motherboard, let parity rebuild, and everything works.

 

Now I have a "spare" exos 14TB drive, so I picked up a SATA controller and plugged it in. Drive 7 (also an exos 14tb) went disabled. So I yanked out the new drive, did the enable/disable on drive 7 and parity is again rebuilding.

 

Is there a place where drive information is stored in unraid? Nothing shows on unassigned or historical drive lists. I'm going to attach the drive to another PC and delete any partitions, format, etc.

 

But I'm left wondering if there's a config somewhere that has this drive SN stored, I just have this feeling that unraid is "remembering" this drive and causing chaos.

[djtodd]

I should note that the Sata controller I'm using for this drive is an ASMedia 1064. 

[trurl]

If Unraid sees the unassigned disk it would show it. No need to wipe since Unraid will clear it when you add it to a new slot. 

 

Can your BIOS see all disks? 

 

 

[djtodd]

13 hours ago, trurl said:

If Unraid sees the unassigned disk it would show it. No need to wipe since Unraid will clear it when you add it to a new slot. 

 

Can your BIOS see all disks? 

 

 

BIOS can, yes. 

 

Once this latest round of parity check is complete in ~8 hours I'll re-attach the drive and post screen shots of the garbage that shows up in unRAID.

[JorgeB]

Please also post the diagnostics.

[djtodd]

14 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Please also post the diagnostics.

 

Will do!

[djtodd]

OK, so this time I started it up in safe mode, and I was able to add the device in as my 2nd parity drive. 

 

 

HOWEVER.

 

When I cancelled the parity check and rebooted into normal mode, everything goes to hell.

 

 

Diagnostics attached.

 

tower-diagnostics-20220729-1739.zip

[JorgeB]

You're passing-through this controller to your VM:

 

08:00.0 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901] (rev 51)
    Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901]
    Kernel driver in use: vfio-pci
    Kernel modules: ahci

 

So when the VM starts any disk connect there will be inaccessible.

[djtodd]

2 hours ago, JorgeB said:

You're passing-through this controller to your VM:

 

08:00.0 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901] (rev 51)
    Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901]
    Kernel driver in use: vfio-pci
    Kernel modules: ahci

 

So when the VM starts any disk connect there will be inaccessible.

 

Where would this even be set? I haven't set up the VM to pass through anything other than the graphics card. Is it somehow grabbing it by default?

 

[ChatNoir]

1 minute ago, djtodd said:

Where would this even be set? I haven't set up the VM to pass through anything other than the graphics card. Is it somehow grabbing it by default?

 

It is possible that adding/changing PCIE extension card changed the IDs of some HW elements and the controller ended up with the ID that was allocated to your graphics card before.

 

[JorgeB]

2 minutes ago, djtodd said:

Is it somehow grabbing it by default?

Not possible, but these addresses can change if you change/add/remove any harware, it's done by editing the VM config, in the end, it should be under "other PCI devices", just unselect it with the VM stopped, e.g.:

 

[djtodd]

Interestingly, I started the array, with the VM set to autostart=off. Edited the config, and didn't see anything out of the ordinary in the config.

 

Started the VM and...

 

 

I then stopped the VM, and the SATA controller was present to be unchecked. 

 

Of course, then drive 7 did the disabled thing again, so I had to do the maintenance mode stop/start of the array to get it enabled again. Couldn't stop the array so I had to reboot in safe mode, do the changes, (enabling disk 7 and adding the "new" disk from the SATA controller, Parity 2) and rebooted back into normal mode.

 

I had to reboot into safe mode because the array just wouldn't stop. Something seems very finicky.

 

But its rebooted, the VM is up, and the array is rebuilding for the 4th time in almost as many days.