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8 Posts
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853
August 12th, 2020 07:00
Formating SAS drive on R415
Hello
I have R415 with RAID5 set up. One of the SAS drives needs replacement and I got new one, however I want to format it first before swapping it. How can I do it? Should I put it in the empty slot first? And then what? Is it possible to format it from OS level (Debian)? Is there somekind of utility to do so?
Regards
Patryk
DellEMCSupport
631 Posts
0
August 12th, 2020 12:00
Hello,
If the drive is in a failed state, I wouldn't expect to be able to interact with the file system on it. If it was a RAID member, you won't be able to format the disk, because only a segment of the data would be on the drive. You could potentially create a RAID 0 volume on the single drive and perform a full initialization. This should remove any data that was previously on the drive, but it would require that the controller be able to interact with the drive at all, and it may not be able to.
If the drive wasn't originally a RAID member, then you might be able to run a format from the OS level. Debian has a man page for fdisk, I'll link to it below. However, since you mentioned that the drive was a RAID 5 member, we'd really only be able to go with an initialization, or you could potentially look into a third party disk overwrite utility, but there are none I could recommend.
https://dell.to/3gTgZQH
patj
8 Posts
0
August 18th, 2020 00:00
Hello.
Sorry I may have to be more specific
What I meant is that I got "new" SAS drive and that's the one I want to format before putting in place of failed drive. (It's now brand new and I dont know if there is something on it or what file system does it use currently.)
I'll try to format it from OS level first.
Thank you.
DellEMCSupport
631 Posts
0
August 18th, 2020 07:00
Hello,
The replacement drive won't have a file system until it is formatted by you. It would just be raw space.
Regardless, you're definitely taking the right steps. Be advised, if you're connected to a PERC instead of an HBA, you may need to make it a virtual disk member, first. Otherwise, you should just need to format it like you said, and then it should be ready for use.