Advanced Format Drives - WD10EARS WD15EARS WD20EARS

[NAS]

Sounds identical to my problem.

 

I would guess that unRAID is seeing the drive as partitioned/formatted but broken because of the shift. I am clueless what to do next

 

Anyone?

[prostuff1]

There have been some who said that the drive goes weird after installing the jumper and that they did and RMA through WD.  They got the new drive back and all worked as expected. The only other thing you might want to try and a low level wipe of the drive with the jumper on when it is hooked up to a windows machine.  I think WD offers a WD tools (or something similar) that might do a wipe for you... or there is DBAN.

[purko]

Why don't you try erasing the begining of the disk (partition table and stuff) before jumpering it?

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=64

Replace "sdX" above with the device name of your disk. Be very careful not to do that on some other disk!

 

[Joe L.]

Sounds identical to my problem.

 

I would guess that unRAID is seeing the drive as partitioned/formatted but broken because of the shift. I am clueless what to do next

 

Anyone?

You can try:

leave the jumper off, attach the drive to a disk controller, zero the first sector on the disk that defines the partition table and the one following.

 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX count=2

where sdX = the device for the disk being cleared.  

 

Make sure you get this right, as it will clobber the partition table of a working disk if you give the wrong device name.  (You can easily put it  back, but it will be a bit of a embarrassment when you realized you basically un-partitioned the wrong disk)

 

Then try putting the jumper on and see if the drive will respond.

 

Joe L.

[NAS]

I am moving alot of data arounf this now. After that I will get on this and document for the wiki.

 

Here is hoping thanks everyone

[rd_blair]

After adding the jumper and rebuilding parity drive this is what my syslog says over and over again:

 

 

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000001

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: failed command: READ DMA EXT

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: cmd 25/00:08:a8:88:e0/00:00:e8:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel:          res 51/01:00:af:88:e0/4f:00:e8:00:00/e0 Emask 0x1 (device error)

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1: EH complete

 

[NAS]

No luck

 

The procedure i followed was:

 

Power down

Remove the jumper

Power up (successful)

Locate the problem 15EARS device in the Devices page of the unRAID gui

 

i.e.    pci-0000:00:11.0-scsi-3:0:0:0">pci-0000:00:11.0-scsi-3:0:0:0 host4 (sdc) WDC_WD15EARS-00Z5B1_WD-WMAVU1336468

 

Run the command

 

root@TOWER:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc count=2

2+0 records in

2+0 records out

1024 bytes (1.0 kB) copied, 0.000558755 s, 1.8 MB/s

root@TOWER:~#

 

Powerdown

Intsall the jumper

Poweron

 

 

Again we have what looks like an infinite error loop and unRAID never seem to load.

 

Out of ideas again.

 

[Joe L.]

No luck

 

The procedure i followed was:

 

Power down

Remove the jumper

Power up (successful)

Locate the problem 15EARS device in the Devices page of the unRAID gui

 

i.e.    pci-0000:00:11.0-scsi-3:0:0:0">pci-0000:00:11.0-scsi-3:0:0:0 host4 (sdc) WDC_WD15EARS-00Z5B1_WD-WMAVU1336468

 

Run the command

 

root@TOWER:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc count=2

2+0 records in

2+0 records out

1024 bytes (1.0 kB) copied, 0.000558755 s, 1.8 MB/s

root@TOWER:~#

 

Powerdown

Intsall the jumper

Poweron

 

 

Again we have what looks like an infinite error loop and unRAID never seem to load.

 

Out of ideas again.

 

Only one idea left... RMA the drive if you can't live with the slower performance.

[NAS]

I have like 5 of these drives and to RMA them i would have to buy 5 more drives and copy the data.

 

aka a complete PITA

 

going to try WD Align Windows

[BRiT]

So all 5 of them do not like the Jumper? Or is it only 1 of the 5? You should only have to RMA the drive which doesn't like the jumper.

[NAS]

I picked a random one of the 5 and emptied all the data from it. The plan was to slowly move data from drive to drive installing the jumper along the way.

 

I have enough spare HDD capacity to may do a second one but it will be a push and would require jamming a a dozen or so disks full

[NAS]

OK i have tried everything i can think of.

 

It seems that if you format the drive without a jumper then in some scenarios adding rh jumper later on is impossible (at least at this time).

 

So be warned, remember the jumper.

 

Roll on unRAID native support

 

Edit: For reference 11-Cable Test::Read diagnostics sector error! is the error the official WD diagnostics tool reports

[rd_blair]

I tried to align my WD20EARS parity drive with WDalign by Acronis. Used the bootable cd version. WDalign found the drive and partion but said there was an error and refused to continue.

 

>

 

Any thoughts?

[purko]

I tried to align my WD20EARS parity drive with WDalign by Acronis. Used the bootable cd version. WDalign found the drive and partion but said there was an error and refused to continue.

What exactly were you trying to "allign"? What WDalign does is it makes the first partition to start at sector 64 instead of the usual sector 63.  The parity drive doesn't have any partitions, so there's nothing to allign on it.  The data drives in unRAID must have their first partition at sector 63, or unRAID won't recognize them as valid, and will try to repartition them.  So WDalign and similar are of no use on unRAID.  The only thing usable with unRAID (currently) is the jumper -- it makes physical sector 64 show as sector 63.

 

[rd_blair]

Hi Purko:

 

Hope you can help me out

 

I thought that Wdalign would move everything up to sector 64 and make it look like it started at sector 63. I cannot use the jumper because drive was formatted before without it. Drive is supplied with a special format from the factory. When you setup your drive it is a one time deal. If you want to use the jumper it must be installed first.

WD's instructions indicate other operating systems need no jumper. Boy is this wrong!!! Looks like I wasted this drive unless someone can come up with a solution.

Right now the parity drive has no jumper and has been verified.

 

from previous post:

 

After adding the jumper and rebuilding parity drive this is what my syslog says over and over again:

 

 

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000001

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: failed command: READ DMA EXT

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: cmd 25/00:08:a8:88:e0/00:00:e8:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel:          res 51/01:00:af:88:e0/4f:00:e8:00:00/e0 Emask 0x1 (device error)

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33

May 20 15:54:45 Tower kernel: ata1: EH complete

 

[rd_blair]

This is what WDalign looks like on my windows machine

 

[purko]

I thought that Wdalign would move everything up to sector 64 and make it look like it started at sector 63.

No! Only jumper does that. Read my previous post.

 

As a last resort, try this:

1. Unassign that drive from the array.

2. Power down. Remove the jumper.

3. Power up. Apply the 'dd' command from this post.

4. Power down. Install jumper on pins 7-8. (make very sure you correctly identify pins 7 and 8, as they are to the left)

5. Power up. Check the syslog and see if you still have those errors.

 

If the errors are still there, you have only two options to chose from:

A. Use your drive without a jumper. (Don't "allign" anything!)

B. RMA it. When the replacement drive arrives, put a jumper on it right out of the box!

 

[purko]

This is what WDalign looks like on my windows machine

Forget about WDalign!  WDalign alligns partitions.  It moves partition #1 to sector 64.  That's all.

Such disk would be incompatible with the current version of unRAID.

 

[rd_blair]

Thank you.

 

I will try that.

 

Will post if results are positive.

[Thornwood]

So could we just install the jumper and run a preclear? or preclear then install the jumper and run another preclear?

 

Kind of wieard?

[purko]

So could we just install the jumper and run a preclear? or preclear then install the jumper and run another preclear?

If you don't install the jumper right out of the box -- before ever putting the drive in a computer -- you'll run into trouble.

 

[NAS]

So could we just install the jumper and run a preclear? or preclear then install the jumper and run another preclear?

If you don't install the jumper right out of the box -- before ever putting the drive in a computer -- you'll run into trouble.

 

 

I cant say why this is true (as if i could i could possibly make it not true) but this is spot on.

 

IMHO dont even bother trying. I have given up after trying everything i could think of.

[captain_video]

I've installed several of the WD15EARS drives in my server and ran into problems, some of which I documented earlier in this and other threads.  The only workaround I found to be effective was to perform a low level format of the drive with the jumper installed and then perform a preclear with the jumpered drive in the array.  Once I did that the drive was recognized and the data was restored from parity.  I've been running the drives for over a month now with no issues.

[NAS]

how did you perform a low level format?

[bubbaQ]

how did you perform a low level format?

 

debug g=c800:5  ;D ;D