Restore unformatted drives

Question

I made a mistake.

I was formatting my four 4t drives with sg_format -v -F /dev/sd...

The first one went well. After that, I launched in parallel the other 3 formats.

/dev/sdb suddenly failed, and I made the mistake to reboot the system, without waiting for the format of /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd.

Now the third and fourth disk are unformatted without a filesystem.

On the os if I do lsblk I only see the first disk and the usb (truenas scale os).

In the bios I see all disks. The second has the state "Failed". The third and fourth "Ready", with a size of 0KB.

I switched to raid mode, cleared the configuration, and selected "secure erase" on the drives, but nothing happens.

Is it possible to restore my drives? How can I do it?

Dell r430

Perc h330 mini

DELL-Marco B · Answer

I don't think a format can compromise a hard drive on a physical level. Have you tried creating a new RAID volume from the controller, and initializing it?

Matteo00 · Answer

I can't add the drives to a raid array. I can see them in the section 'physical drives', but when I try to create a new configuration there is only the first drive

DELL-Marco B · Answer

If you cannot add hard drive from the controller then probably the hard drive has failed and it is impossible to recover I think

Matteo00 · Answer

Here are some pictures of the drives

DELL-Marco B · Answer

Please try to enter in the controller BIOS with CTRL R at boot, it should be a green screen. From there try to to see which operation you can do to physical disks.

Try also to see if there are some foreign configuration and delete it

Matteo00 · Answer

I switched from uefi to bios. entered perc h330 mini bios configuration and setted raid mode.
I can see the three physical drivers, all with 0 capacity. one disk with status failed and two disks with status blocked

Apparently the only permitted operation is to blink the leds

On the healthy drive i can do : led blinking, secure erase, converto to raid capable.

if i switch on hba mode, no operation is permitted

There was no saved configuration. I also cleaned the controller saves and selected factory reset, but nothing changed

DELL-Chris H · Answer

Matteo00,

Would you confirm if everything is up to date on the server, as well as the firmware for the drives themselves?

Also, would you confirm the part number for the drives, if the drives came from another device, and if so what device they were previously installed in.

Let us know.

Matteo00 · Answer

Yes,

Firmware: 2.83.83.83

Bios: 2.16.0

Controller: 25.5.9.0001

In Idrac there are other functions I can do on the drives.

On the healthy one, I can only convert to Raid

The failed drive is visible in Physical Disks -> Properties section but not in the setup section

On the two blocked drives, I can "Unassign Hotspares", "Global Hotspare", and "Convert to non-RAID".

If I do convert to non-raid it fails with message PR21: Failed

Before the crash, the drives were all visible and functional.

DELL-Marco B · Answer

Hello, as per Chris request, can you confirm the part number of the drive? Thanks

Matteo00 · Answer

There is no part number, even in the healthy one

DELL-Marco B · Answer

You can check in a label physically on the hard drive. It is a CN-0.. etc number.

Anyway it is just to see if it is a Dell hard drive, it won't solve your issue.

If you cannot perform any action on the controller bios then the hard drives are not recoverable sorry

PowerEdge Hardware General

Restore unformatted drives

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