Replaced Parity (Upgraded to 6tb) old 4tb drive refuses to format.

[kysdaddy]

Ok guy's don't take this the wrong way, I'm not proud of my screwups but this one has got to take the cake.

Original install I used a 4 TB parity drive and a bunch of drives 4tb and smaller. Decided to go bigger and switched out to a 6tb parity added a second 6tb drive and wanted/want to include the old 4tb parity drive into the array.

Simple right!

Not for me, the parity upgrade went perfect, the second 6tb drive added to the array no problem.

In order to add the old parity to the array I needed to remove a 350gb drive that was at the back of my array with nothing written to it.

 

I followed directions to shrinking the array, removed the 350 gb rebuilt the parity and all should have been good, right? nope.

When I tried to add the 4tb drive, for some reason it keeps wanting to Sync will start Parity-Sync and/or Data-Rebuild if I let it do that it formats itself to 2.2 tb and will not let me add it to the array, it says 

xfs Unmountable: Unsupported partition layout and shows as a 2.2tb drive I have pulled it and deleted the partition and formatted on a windows machine but it keeps doing the same thing. This just makes no sense.

In the end, I am sure that it will be nothing more than operator malfunction but any help is appreciated.

 

Chas

 

 

tower-diagnostics-20200211-1721.zip

[Squid]

Is the drive plugged into this

05:08.0 SCSI storage controller [0100]: Broadcom / LSI SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS [1000:0054] (rev 01)
	Subsystem: Dell SAS 5/E Adapter Controller [1028:1f04]
	Kernel driver in use: mptsas
	Kernel modules: mptsas

LSI1068 controllers are quite old, and do not support > 2.2TB

[JorgeB]

27 minutes ago, kysdaddy said:

for some reason it keeps wanting to Sync will start Parity-Sync and/or Data-Rebuild

That's because you're replacing a disk, not adding one, current diags start with that disk already disable so can't see what happened but I would guess the smaller disk was not removed correctly. 

 

Disk is showing as 2.2TB because it's on a controller that doesn't support larger disks, also likely why it's failing to format, though it shouldn't, but same happened recently to another user.

[kysdaddy]

Yes it is on that controler. It is in an MD1000 the ODD part is that there is also a 6tb sas drive in the first bay of the  MD1000 Disk #8. At one point I had another 4tb drive in the MD1000 as well.

 

Chas

 

[JorgeB]

7 hours ago, kysdaddy said:

the ODD part

That is weird, but I can almost guarantee that if you connect the 4TB disk tot eh onboard controller it will work correctly, no idea why the 6TB is working, it shouldn't.

[kysdaddy]

If I change controllers on the md10000, what controller do you recommend?

 

Chas

[JorgeB]

Any LSI with a SAS2008/2308/3008/3408 chipset in IT mode, e.g., 9201-8i, 9211-8i, 9207-8i, 9300-8i, 9400-8i, etc and clones, like the Dell H200/H310 and IBM M1015, these latter ones need to be crossflashed.

[kysdaddy]

I am going to magnify my ignorance here, but what the heck. Can I swap out the controller card without having to format and loose all of the info on the drives ? I am guessing that I can but my guesses haven't proven to be that accurate lately.

 

[JorgeB]

1 minute ago, kysdaddy said:

Can I swap out the controller card without having to format and loose all of the info on the drives ?

Yes, devices are tracked by serial, there could be issues when using RAID controllers that use a custom identification, which shouldn't be a problem in this case, but it is you'll get a lot of wrong disk errors and the array won't start, no harm done.