Question Can't partition SAS drives

[jamesdsimone]

I'm having an issue partition my SAS drives. They are 4Tb Seagate 7E8 drives. The Windows device manager shows them present and working properly. Hardware Info also shows them as present and ok. I use partition magic mini tool which shows them but reports them as bad drives. I partitioned 2 Hitachi 2Tb drives ok.

 

[Shmee]

Have you had any luck troubleshooting this yet? Also, how exactly does the partition magic tool report the SAS drives as bad?

 

[jamesdsimone]

Have you had any luck troubleshooting this yet? Also, how exactly does the partition magic tool report the SAS drives as bad?

Mini Tool gives the proper size but just says bad drive and does not give any option to take any action. I booted into Linux Mint and Gparted does not show the drives at all.

 

[Shmee]

Hmm curious. How exactly do you have the drives connected in this system? Do you have a SAS HBA card, and how are the drives mounted? Like are they connected to a backplane or? I am just wondering if anything else could be suspect here.

 

[tcsenter]

Imma take a wild guess man, I think the drives might be bad i.e. defective. Check for firmware update?

 

[jamesdsimone]

Hmm curious. How exactly do you have the drives connected in this system? Do you have a SAS HBA card, and how are the drives mounted? Like are they connected to a backplane or? I am just wondering if anything else could be suspect here.

I have them installed in one of my HP z840's. They have 4 onboard SATA ports and 8 onboard dual SATA/SAS ports. There are 4 hot swap bays that are wired to the dual ports.

 

[jamesdsimone]

Imma take a wild guess man, I think the drives might be bad i.e. defective. Check for firmware update?

I thought of that, of course. But I have tried 4 drives in 2 different bays. I can see one bad drives but all 4? And Windows device manager reports them as working properly.

 

[jamesdsimone]

The drives are SAS 3 and my controller is an LSI sas2 2308 mustang -Storport. From what I read the drives should work with a SAS 2 controller but just default to 6 gb/s instead of 12gb/s.

 

[tcsenter]

Is there a firmware/controller config utility or OROM that could have control for the SAS transfer rate? Perhaps it is not auto-negotiating that, for whatever reason.

 

[jamesdsimone]

Is there a firmware/controller config utility or OROM that could have control for the SAS transfer rate? Perhaps it is not auto-negotiating that, for whatever reason.

Looks like there is an HP management utility for the SAS controller. I'll install it and see if that will help.

 

[jamesdsimone]

It is just a server setup utlities.

 

[tcsenter]

I was thinking OROM like during boot. None more ideas for me. I don't have any experience with this board.

 

[jamesdsimone]

I was thinking OROM like during boot. None more ideas for me. I don't have any experience with this board.

I'll check the BIOS options. I think it is a Supermicro board.

 

[tcsenter]

I'll check the BIOS options. I think it is a Supermicro board.

Have you found others using this particular combo? You see BIOS and firmware updates all the time released to 'solve some issue with some particular drive model on some particular controller'. If others using these drives with that controller then it should rule that one out. Obviously not going to get any more firmware updates from LSI/Broadcom, but maybe the HDD manufacturer.

 

[jamesdsimone]

I was searching for info last night and saw someone who says they are running 14Tb SAS drives in their z840. I messaged them but not heard anything back. I found the manual but couldn't find any software. The drives are ST4000NM0125's.

https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/migrated-assets/www-content/product-content/enterprise-hdd-fam/enterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd/enterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd/en-us/docs/100827322b.pdf

 

[tcsenter]

So can you more clarify what is the actual problem?

The Windows device manager shows them present and working properly. Hardware Info also shows them as present and ok.

Are you just freaking because some partition tool told you the drives were bad? Are they partitioned yes? Working yes?

 

[jamesdsimone]

So can you more clarify what is the actual problem?



Are you just freaking because some partition tool told you the drives were bad? Are they partitioned yes? Working yes?

No the drives are not partitioned. I have not been able to partition them so don't know if they are working properly. I have tried 4 different partitioning software. Two do not show the drives. Mini Tool shows them but won't let me partition them. They are reading as MBR and bad drives. I was able to run partition recovery. It is running now but will probably take all night to finish.

 

[Thazdude]

When they complete that operation, try running sudo fdisk -l /dev/"drive" (lsdev to find the drives) to see what the physical sector size is. If the sector size is anything other than 512 or 4096 it won't work with standard operating systems. I bought some HP enterprise drives that were formatted to 520 byte physical sectors because whatever HP enterprise OS they were designed to work with had an extra 8 bytes of checksum data stored in the last 8 bytes; they wouldn't work until I did a mid level reformat to 512 byte physical sectors. If you do need to do that the linux utility sg3_utils will do it.

 

[jamesdsimone]

When they complete that operation, try running sudo fdisk -l /dev/"drive" (lsdev to find the drives) to see what the physical sector size is. If the sector size is anything other than 512 or 4096 it won't work with standard operating systems. I bought some HP enterprise drives that were formatted to 520 byte physical sectors because whatever HP enterprise OS they were designed to work with had an extra 8 bytes of checksum data stored in the last 8 bytes; they wouldn't work until I did a mid level reformat to 512 byte physical sectors. If you do need to do that the linux utility sg3_utils will do it.

The manual says the sector size is 512. The scan will probably take days. It has been running since last night and it has only scanned ~55m sectors out of ~7800m sectors.

 

[tcsenter]

Tried another partition utility? e.g. Windows DISKPART, GParted, EASEUS, AOMEI? Mini Tool Partition Wizard last time I used it was not working correctly or the action I wanted to perform was only available in the paid/licensed version.

As for checking drive health, have you tried HD Sentinel (free)?

 

[jamesdsimone]

I've tried Gparted on Linux. I'll check out some others.

 

[Shmee]

No the drives are not partitioned. I have not been able to partition them so don't know if they are working properly. I have tried 4 different partitioning software. Two do not show the drives. Mini Tool shows them but won't let me partition them. They are reading as MBR and bad drives. I was able to run partition recovery. It is running now but will probably take all night to finish.

Since these are 14TB drives, they need to be initialized as GPT, not MBR. Not sure if this is causing the issue though. MBR only supports up to 2TB.

 

[jamesdsimone]

Since these are 14TB drives, they need to be initialized as GPT, not MBR. Not sure if this is causing the issue though. MBR only supports up to 2TB.

The drives are 4Tb. The 14Tb were someone on the net who was also using SAS drives in their z840. The seller says it's a firmware issue. I assume I can update that?

 

[Micrornd]

Have you tried installing the LSI Megaraid Storage Manager utility?
Any drives connected to the 2308 chipset good or bad "should" show up there in some form.
As Shmee said, the drives need to be initialized/reinitialized as GPT.

 

[jamesdsimone]

Have you tried installing the LSI Megaraid Storage Manager utility?
Any drives connected to the 2308 chipset good or bad "should" show up there in some form.
As Shmee said, the drives need to be initialized/reinitialized as GPT.

Yes I tried that utility and didn't see any drives. My two SATA drives are connected through the SAS/SATA ports but I assume the SATA controller is handling them. I've tried initializing to GPT and get I/O errors.