[SOLVED] 2 of 4 drives Unsupported Partition Layout

[Freshcelery]

I have recently tried to set up unraid for the first time, moving from a windows machine with a Hardware external raid (Mediasonic ProRaid 4).

I bought 2 new drives, a 12tb HDD for parity and a 256gb SSD for cache.

I wanted to move over my 4 (6tb) drives from my previous setup to be my main data drives. Before moving the drives over, I switched the hardware raid to be single drive mode, and formatted all the drives in Windows (I have hard backups of all my data on other drives). I then moved my drives to be inside of my machine and set up unraid.

On initial setup, 2 of my 4 drives were displaying as Unsupported Partition Layout. This repeated after formatting multiple times. I read online that maybe running XFS_REPAIR would help so I ran that on one of the failing drives but after 2 days of waiting it never finished.

I then installed the Unassigned Devices + plugin, and ran the Destructive mode format on both failing harddrives, almost instantly both formats failed with no error in the logs. Example log output below:
 

May 23 13:48:01 FC-RAID emhttpd: WDC_WD60EFRX-68L0BN1_WD-WXB1HB4LXV1V (sdc) 512 11721045168
May 23 13:48:12 FC-RAID unassigned.devices: Device '/dev/sdc' block size: 11721045168
May 23 13:48:12 FC-RAID unassigned.devices: Clearing partition table of disk '/dev/sdc'.
May 23 13:48:12 FC-RAID unassigned.devices: Reloading disk '/dev/sdc' partition table.
May 23 13:48:13 FC-RAID unassigned.devices: Reload partition table result: /dev/sdc: re-reading partition table
May 23 13:48:13 FC-RAID unassigned.devices: Creating a primary partition on disk '/dev/sdc'.
May 23 13:48:13 FC-RAID unassigned.devices: Creating Unraid compatible gpt partition on disk '/dev/sdc'.
May 23 13:48:15 FC-RAID unassigned.devices: Reloading disk '/dev/sdc' partition table.
May 23 13:48:15 FC-RAID unassigned.devices: Reload partition table result: /dev/sdc: re-reading partition table
May 23 13:48:15 FC-RAID unassigned.devices: Formatting disk '/dev/sdc' with 'xfs' filesystem.

I have been scouring the internet trying to find a solution, I know the drives aren't dead as after formatting them in windows they were working fine and I have been using them quite a while without issue. I am at my wits end, any help would be greatly appreciated (I really don't want to go back to using Windows).

If there is any additional info you need please let me know, I am new to all this so patience is appreciated

EDIT: I tried adding all my 6TB drives without adding a parity device and all of the devices seemed to add to the array fine, but when I re-added the parity drive the 2 devices failed again... not sure what is causing that but maybe an issue with my parity drive? It is a brand new 12tb drive so idk why it would fail.

Edited May 23, 2020 by Freshcelery

[itimpi]

You should post you site diagnostics zip file (obtained via Tools >> Diagnostics) so we can get a better idea of what is going on.

 

my initial thought would be to remove all existing partitions from the drives before trying to use them with Unraid. Unraid wants a very specific partition layout and it sounds as if for some unknown reason it is having trouble partitioning the drives as it wants them.

[Freshcelery]

fc-raid-diagnostics-20200523-1610.zip

Sorry, I have added the diagnostics in zip format above.

I also forgot to mention that I also tried making a new partition on the 2 failing drives using parted to create a single xfs partition on each drive that encompasses the entire amount of data available on the drive. It seemed to create the partition successfully but when I restarted and loaded Unraid GUI it was giving me the same errors.

[Freshcelery]

I will add, I am beginning to think it is an issue with my motherboard. I tried switching the ports each drive is plugged into, essentially swapping the top and bottom 2. On reboot of the machine it is still saying /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc are the drives failing, but if I am not mistaken sdb refers to the port that the drive is plugged into and not the port itself, correct?

Therefore the ports may be the issue and not the actual drives.

[trurl]

2 hours ago, Freshcelery said:

sdb refers to the port that the drive is plugged into and not the port itself, correct?

Unraid doesn't care about the port or the sdX designation, it keeps track of disks by serial number. The sdX designations can change from one boot to another regardless of port, though it often will not change unless you add or remove disks.

[Freshcelery]

So it will still be referring to the same 2 disks even if I change which ports they are plugged into?

[trurl]

1 minute ago, Freshcelery said:

So it will still be referring to the same 2 disks even if I change which ports they are plugged into?

If you mean the sdX designation, there is no guarantee what disk that will refer to after booting regardless of what you do. It is usually not important to even know that designation.

[JorgeB]

Those two SATA ports are set to IDE, and that is known to cause issues with those AMD chipsets, change them to AHCI/SATA, there's usually a separate setting on the BIOS for ports 5/6.

[Freshcelery]

8 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

Those two SATA ports are set to IDE, and that is known to cause issues with those AMD chipsets, change them to AHCI/SATA, there's usually a separate setting on the BIOS for ports 5/6.

SMH, this was the problem. What a fool I am.

Thank you VERY much dude, I really appreciate it. This was making me lose my mind!