I had a 3 disk zfs pool, and wanted to increase its size to 5. I went ahead and moved all data off the disks, removed the datasets, removed the pool, rebooted, then used unassigned devices to format the drives individually and then created a new pool.  Now I want to format the pool, but when I click on the 'Format will create a file system in all Unmountable disks', it says that it is formatting but then returns the same 'Unmountable: wrong or no file system' message. 

 

 

checked zpool import:

root@Tower:~# zpool import
no pools available to import

 

 

tower-diagnostics-20250401-1900.zip

Stop the array, then click the first pool device and "erase pool", then set the filesystem and profile you want, start the array, attempt to format, if it still fails, post new diags.

Followed your instructions, same problemtower-diagnostics-20250401-1919.zip

Stop the array, type

rm -r /mnt/cache

 

Start the array, try again

No change

tower-diagnostics-20250401-2056.zip

Edited April 1, 20251 yr by GMAsterAU
added diagnostics

Apr  1 20:55:12 Tower root: mountpoint '/mnt/cache' exists and is not empty

 

This should not happen, if you typed the command above and it exists again, you have something creating that path, like a bad mapping in a container for example.

I used the command, ran it twice, first time it said nothing, second time it returned that there was nothing to rm.

The I started array, formatted drives, which again seemingly did nothing, but I just discovered that despite the message that it is unmountable, I can see cache in MC and create a folder on it.

I figured it out. It was a user script that was running at array start up. It was writing to a path driectly to cache and as such I guess interrupted the formatting process. Once I disabled it and then ran through the steps it worked.

 

For future reference: 

- empty cache

- turn off Docker

- pause all userscripts writing to cache on array start

- stop the array,

- click the first pool device and "erase pool"

- set the filesystem and profile you want

- start the array,

- format

 

 

Thank you for your help