from rook@lemmy.zip to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 26 Dec 03:33
https://lemmy.zip/post/55713204
Did I just brick my SAS drive?
I was trying to make a pool with the other 5 drives and this one kept giving errors. As a completer beginner I turned to gpt…
What can I do? Is that drive bricked for good?
Don’t clown on me, I understand my mistake in running shell scripts from Ai…
EMPTY DRIVES NO DATA
The initial error was:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/0b359fc7-cd61-4d8d-861a-65f1ed5ea649.avif">
Edit: sde and SDA are the same drive, name just changed for some reason And also I know it was 100% my fault and preventable 😞
**Edit: ** from LM22, output of sudo sg_format -vv /dev/sda (broken link)
BIG EDIT:
For people that can help (btw, thx a lot), some more relevant info:
Exact drive model: SEAGATE ST4000NM0023 XMGG
HBA model and firmware: lspci | grep -i raid 00:17.0 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation SATA Controller [RAID mode] Its an LSI card Bought it here
Kernel version / distro: I was using Truenas when I formatted it. Now trouble shooting on other PC got (6.8.0-38-generic), Linux Mint 22
Whether the controller supports DIF/DIX (T10 PI): output of lspci -vv (broken link)
Whether other identical drives still work in the same slot/cable: yes all the other 5 drives worked when i set up a RAIDZ2 and a couple of them are exact same model of HDD
COMMANDS This is what I got for each command: (broken link)
Solved by y0din! Thank you soo much!
Thanks for all the help 😁
threaded - newest
It’s really next to impossible to read that and not clown on you, so I’ll just print these out and hang them in the server room next to the no cats or drinks signs.
No cats?! High blasphemy! Servers are warm and the perfect bed!
My dogs, whom I love like a family member, and one of which is my seizure dog, know the lab is off limits.
AI strikes again.
Why do you trust a text generator for critical things? And did you really not cross check what command it is asking you to run?
Anyway, the solution…
If I were you I would plug the drive into a system where I can run gparted or KDE Partition Manager, with a GUI and try to format the drive again, create the partition table again. If you have tried that, what errors are you getting?
Thanks for the input
I thought the SAS worked like a data, just wipe and go… I’m not sure how to get this SAS connected to another computer as it is connected to my server through a SAS card…
Any ideas?
I have never worked with SAS drives. Another way to do what I suggested is to connect the server to a display output and boot a linux ISO with a libe environment.
Yeah, generally it does. Maybe just see if there’s a command to turn DIF off? I’ve never had an issue using a SAS drive just like any other. It’s certainly not anything permanent.
sg_formatcan restore your disk.You need to figure out the block layout of the drive and restore a sector map that aligns with the disk.
Start here:
forum.level1techs.com/t/…/133021
And it bears repeating: LLMs do not think, they generate text from statistical output. If the the topic is advanced or uncommon, errors in output are far more likely.
So don’t be tempted to ask chat gpt for further help on this, if that isn’t clear yet.
From what I understand, I formatted it with 512, but i needed to do it with 520 and then 512?
sg_format -v --format --size=520 /dev/sda
then
sg_format -v --format --size=512 /dev/sda
Well, no… You need to find the geometry of your disk.
ChatGPT didn’t fry your drive. You fried your drive.
You should be looking up these commands and flags before you run them.
Don’t trust AI to know what they’re doing for you. The only time they work reliably as a tool is when you already know what you’re doing enough to spot their errors/hallucinations.
AI is the wrong tool here. You need to do real internet research.
Exactly this. People here mass downvote but I personally find AI to be extremely useful… To do things I already know how to do but don’t have the time for. I don’t trust it to do things I can’t spot the errors in
The only useful thing I’ve found so good for is quickly scrubbing though shops. They are really good at looking at hundreds of urls and reviewing the content and then vomiting up the results
When looking for a laptop it was invaluable.
Those sub reddits that are basically nothing but people asking for laptop recommendations basically could just be replaced with a LLM.
AI is after all the perfect example of wisdom of the masses. Aka 80% accurate 80% of the time.
Seriously trying to find a 18 inch hdr laptop with a AMD CPU and replaceable ram that did not contain a laundry list of parts that I know have no driver support on Linux… Is a pain in the ass. Cause half the time AMD laptops arnt advertised at fucking all and sit on some random page you have to know just exists.
Even using newegg filters couldn’t find the fucking laptop cause of mislabeling. But the AI found it.
Fucking thing is like a web crawler on crack.
I actually had an AI assist me in flashing the firmware, as well as flashing a custom ROM later on, of a phone I was just testing on for fun, and I was only confident since I had a chunk of prior knowledge of ADB as well as other tools and the differences between mobile and desktop system structures, and for the stuff I didn’t understand or know, I just researched externally and figured it out.
Blindly trusting it though is a fools errand, just like myself a few years back messing with my laptop’s Linux install, copy pasting everything and then complaining when shit broke.
I tell people not to do that all the time. They’d rather listen to the statistical vomit machine.
Can you blame them?
The manuals are written by experts for experts and in most cases entirely useless for complete beginners who likely won’t be able to even find the right manual page (or even the right manual to begin with).
Tutoral pages are overwhelmingly AI vomit too, but AI vomit from last year’s AI, so even worse than asking AI right now.
Asking for help online just gets you a “lol, RTFM, noob!”
Look at this thread right now and count how many snarky bullshit answers are there that don’t even try to answer the question, how many answers like “I got no idea” are there and then how many actually helpful answers are here.
Can you really blame anyone who turns to AI, because that garbage at least sounds like it tries to help you?
Depends heavily on what place you ask for help in. There are plenty of spaces explicitly meant for community tech support. In OPs case, I’ll say the title doesn’t help and asking an LLM for advice on a topic you’re unfamiliar with (and not second-guessing the commands you paste into the terminal) is such a bad idea that it really can’t be understated. I regularly catch some of my colleagues making AI-assisted mistakes and they’re professionals who genuinely know better. This shit shouldn’t ever be recommended as a learning tool for beginners without some kind of supervision or guard rails to ensure you’re not being gaslit.
A comfortable lie is still a lie. Everything that comes out of an LLM is a lie until proven otherwise. (“Lie” is a bit misleading, though, as they don’t have agency or intent: they’re a variation of your phone keyboard’s next-word text prediction algorithm. With added flattery and confidence.)
There’s a reason experienced people stress hard to others about not using them as shortcuts to your own knowledge. This is the outcome.
Another way to look at it is “trust, but verify”. If you’re intent on relying on probabilistic text as an answer, instead of bothering to learn, then take what it’s given you and verify what that does before doing it. You could learn to be an effective sloperator with just that common sense.
But if you’re going to give an LLM root/admin access to a production environment, then expect to be laughed at, because you had plenty of opportunities to not destroy something and actively chose not to use them.
I had a problem with Fedora 42, where the performance of my games would be fine one day and abysmal another day. Couldn’t find a pattern. I googled a ton, tried to debug myself, asked on reddit, stackexchange, the fedora forum and lemmy. I only got answers like “Works fine on my machine, noob” and “I have that problem too”. It only affected games running in proton on heroic, everything else was fine.
After about a year of on-and-off debugging and asking around, I swallowed my pride and asked ChatGPT.
First answer from that thing was correct: I had run
dnf updatewithout doing aflatpak updateright afterwards. Turns out, flatpak has its own copy of Nvidia drivers and if the system driver is updated without the flatpak copy being updated, it falls back to software rendering. So the performance was crap until I didflatpak updatethe next time, and broke again when I randnf update.I still haven’t found that in any documentation so far.
AI is crap more often than not, but it does at least try to help and sometimes it actually does.
Look in this thread here. Is there even a single answer that tries to help OP, or is every single answer here just dumb snark?
It’s true that people on the internet can be dicks. Even more so technical people (and that’s not limited to online: those online dicks are usually IRL dicks when taking technical stuff). But that’s a hurdle, not a barrier.
There’s little anyone here can do to help OP, as they (if I understand it correctly) have already irreparably nuked their hardware. The current problem is significantly different and harder than the original problem. Asking randos on this community is unlikely to yield results. Hence the focus on variations of “Now… what did we learn? 🤨”
I’m not trying to help, as I’m not familiar enough with SAS nor the current problem. The same is likely true of others here.
The only evidence that OP irreparably nuked their hardware is ChatGPTs word.
The bigger issue ad hand is that everyone here is a noob when it comes to exotic hardware like SAS, and still everyone here thinks they are 1337 haxors enough to tell OP that they are a noob idiot.
Tbh, if OP asks for help here and there’s 49 comments of people being dicks and one that actually helps it might be worthwhile. But as it stands it’s 50 to 0, with nobody here beeing educated enough to know anything about the subject.
I love how you ignore all the comments that actually tried to help OP. Or maybe you posted early on but you can’t be bothered to go back and edit your response. And then you pretend that AI tries to help us do anything, as if it had motivation or volition. Come on now.
Everything that comes off of a tutorial, or web page is paddling the same boat, without exception.
Are you really comparing LLM output to be on the same level of… hallucination-ness, than a Gamefaqs tutorial for a SNES game from the late 90s?
I know tiktok has deep-fried and rotten the brains of entire generations but this is just ridiculous.
Well, I can’t speak to Gamefaqs or SNES as I am incapable of gaming. However, even what I would consider reputable tutorials such as ones you find on HowToForge, sometimes don’t quite turn out as expected. There is always some config or app that the tutorial needed, but was left out by the person writing the tutorial. Or the writer of the tut, had something pre-configed or preinstalled, so it wasn’t mentioned, even when following the tutorial line by line. It’s inevitable. For this reason, I maintain a small test VPS where I can run amuck and if I fuck something up, no problem, wipe/reinstall. So, if you’re going to say don’t trust AI, then you have to also be skeptical of all tuts. I mean, that’s where the AI scrapers got the info in the first place. I’m not saying AI is 100% tho I anticipate one day it will be, or at least very damn close. There are things AI gets right. It seems very capable of writing compose files well. Just my 2p
Yes, because that’s a natural process. Most tutorial s written by users cover the experience the user had in their own use case. They don’t / can’t cover the same ground or have access to the same levels of examination that the devs can have.
Oh please. Stop licking corporate AI boot and drinking the kool-aid. There’s at least two orders of magnitude of truthfulness and trustability between “a discrete set of tutorials written to cover described use cases” and “a random mix and blend hodgepodge coke snort prisoner soup ectoplasm of all the above, fine-tuned to invent answers that produce gratification and brand dependence”. You saying that these two things are as trustable as each other suggests you have quite a misanthropic edge to your personality and/or are going through a stage of cult-of-personality (or cult-of-brand).
I trust the humans who write the tutorials that have em-dashes. I don’t trust an AI that just slurped and pirated the work of those humans to try and snake-oil me with a bunch of grammar mistakes adorned with em-dashes.
Why must you think that because I use AI that I have somehow ‘drank the kool-aid’ and am ‘licking corporate boots’? Why is that always the go to with you guys? It’s like blood in the water. Look, I am willing to accept that you vociferously dislike/hate/abhor AI. You have a definite opinion about AI. Got it loud and clear. Much like I have a definite opinion about the ‘arr stack’ which I would say that 75% of selfhosters run. You don’t hear me out here beating my tin pan every time someone mentions the arr stack tho. Why? Because I figure you are an autonomous adult capable of making your own choices, and I leave it at that. No long diatribes about copyright or theft. None of that. I let you be you, and make your own decisions…without all the browbeating.
As I have stated before, I too am fully aware, and fully autonomous. OP used AI, didn’t write down anything, lots of mistakes were made. It’s not like none of us haven’t pulled some stupid boners in our self hosting journey either. You live and learn. It does zero good tho, to brow beat OP because they made some mistakes or used AI. In fact, I would say it would drive people to use AI because of the negative reactions in this very thread.
Your unsubstantiated and unqualified psychoanalysis is way off. Maybe you’re using the wrong AI.
Oh this so very much. We’ve ALL made horrific mistakes, most of which don’t get published on a forum for fear of the snark. It really irks me. But, there’s not much I can do about people’s attitudes. All of us were clueless, newbs, at one time or another, unless you were born with a computing device in your hand, in which case, I feel sorry for your mum.
I mean look at OPs horrible post screenshots and one rotated 90 degrees. Come on they put in little effort don’t expect lots of effort back.
Did it occur to you that OP might be a total beginner who doesn’t know about the conventions on how to report issues and how to format posts?
Yes. LLMs don’t make anyone not responsible for their output.
If your dumb friend gave you bad advice and you followed it, you are ultimately still responsible for your decisions.
What’s your point? “Don’t use Linux unless you are a professional user”?
Beginners have to begin somewhere and they need to get info from somewhere.
A lot of Linux UX is still at the level where it doesn’t give enough relevant information to a non-technical user in a way that the user can actually make an informed decision. That is the core problem.
Whether users get their wrong information from AI, Stackoverflow, random tutorials, Google, a friend or somewhere else hardly matters.
Take for example a look at the setup process of a Synology NAS. A 10yo can successfully navigate that process, because it’s so well done. We need more of that, especially for FOSS stuff.
Too much of Linux is built by engineers for engineers.
This is a thing that honestly still makes me seethe sometimes, because as much as the manuals are there and people should be told to read the manual before anything else, there is a vast difference between a user’s manual and a technical manual. People who answer basic questions by telling the user to RTFManpage instead of leading them to the bropage or the tl;drpage or a simple use case tutorial (or even better, providing the example themselves) ironically builds bad cred for a movement for well-documented software.
The User’s Manual for a car covers, at best, how to turn the ignition on, how to drive, how to brake in difficult conditions and how to change the tires. Maybe it covers where exactly the friggin’ cupholder is. A Technical Manual for a car is for when there’s a real exceptional emergency that’s not simply covered by user service. The computer does not work and someone (not you, but the technician!) needs to know how to pin the RS232 connectors for the emergency interface of the onboard chip. The refrigeration liquid tube has broken off and you need to know what model or measurements the replacement needs to be and what heat can it withstand before it starts melting and likely obstructing the valve. You need to know if (or for how long) the car’s engine can withstand frontal semiautomatic fire and up to what reverse speed can the vehicle perform a safe J-turn maneuver in case you face an ambush.
~95% of manpages I’ve ever seen are Technical Manuals. ~70% of “help” for non-browser systems, as well.
What beginners need to be directed at before anything else is the User’s Manual.
And if that one is not available, go get writing it.
</rant>
All that said, none of that excuses turning to AI. AI is explicitly and specifically for when you don’t want things to work, or for when you are specifically looking for someone to bullshit you. They are for evading responsibility, not for finding solutions.
I totally agree with the rant, and a big issue is that the Linux community specifically consists to a large part of technicians and not users who then go full *surprised pikachu face* when they see a user who is not a technician.
But seriosly, how would a (to quote OP) “total beginner” know that AI is not a good place to look for help?
And, tbh, it sometimes does actually help. AI lies more often than it doesn’t, but it at least tries to help, which is more than I can say of most members of the Linux community.
I had an issue on Fedora 42 where the performance of my games would randomly be abysmal. One day I can play current AAA titles without issue on my Nvidia 4070, the next day I have to measure performance in “Seconds per Frame” even on 15yo indie titles. This issue only affects game started from Heroic, all other things I try including all debugging stuff works fine.
I’m not a new Linux user. I’m a developer and I’ve been using Linux for about 20 years. So I get to debugging, googling, reading bug reports, all that, and can’t find anything. I ask on StackExchange, Lemmy, even Reddit, no result. Most people are like “Works on my machine, noob”, and a handful people are like "I have the same issue and no solution.
So after a year or so I swallow my pride and ask ChatGPT. The first answer is correct: Heroic (and thus all proton/wine games it spawns) runs in Flatpak. Flatpak has its own version of the Nvidia drivers, and if that version doesn’t exactly match the OS driver version it falls back to software rendering. So if I do
dnf updateand it updates the Nvidia drivers this breaks my performance until I doflatpak update. I often ranflatpak updatebeforednf updateand thus my performance sucked.Yes, the majority of the answers I get from AI are lies. But without AI I would still not be able to game on my system.
AI is a tool, and for beginners its a tricky tool, because sometimes it works perfectly, but sometimes it totally messes everything up. The same holds true for pretty much any other source of information made for beginners. Before “Don’t paste AI commands into CLI” we had “Don’t paste stuff from Stackoverflow into CLI” and before that it was “Don’t paste stuff you found on Google into CLI”.
You’re getting hate but you’re right. Friendliness in tech forums is nearly nonexistent.
Kinda as evidenced by a lot of the other responses. Thanks for the affirmation!
I’m torn in how to feel about this. it was stupid to turn to a chatbot for things you know nothing about, as you then can’t even verify anything. and when you are a beginner, you probably shouldn’t start with SAS hardware either because it’s more complicated with the added enterprise features.
You can ask knowledgeable people for help instead of an ai tho
Of course we can blame them. There’s a ton of great help available, but perhaps they’re like you, and their ego is so fragile that they can’t be troubled to scroll past a few trolls to find the perfect answers.
But I think we’re all used to dealing with trolls. Everyone knows how to ignore the trolls. I think the bigger problem is that people are afraid to show ignorance, even if they definitely are ignorant, like OP was here. Imagine that, you don’t want to look foolish on the internet in front of people who don’t know who you are and never will, so you turn to a solution that doesn’t work and actually has the potential to ruin the hardware you bought… So yeah, that’s strange, that’s not rational, we can give psychological explanations, but none of them make the person in question appear reasonable.
Sorry friend.
If your data was occupationally-sensitive or renders you vulnerable to financial ruination, it’s time to move to a recovery phase and see if modern data recovery specialists can work their voodoo.
Remember: never run experimental commands (you or a GenAI) in a live environment. See how it breaks things in a test environment first - if it shits itself, you may even get to learn how to fix it before running the instruction on live data.
Anecdote time! A good friend of mine drove his car to a mutual colleague’s place once because the wipers were about as much use as two chicken breasts on metal poles. He says to our colleague “Hey Foxy, I hear you’re good with cars, can you fix these wipers for me? The rubber seems to be in good nick but it’s not clearing anything”.
“Sure thing,” Foxy proudly announces, “I’ll get to work”.
Foxy strips the wipers down, one component at a time, before dusting his hands off and walking away.
“What’s going on, Foxy? The thing’s still in bits!” my pal says.
“No idea,” says Foxy, “not a fucking Scooby mate” and goes back inside, leaving his wipers and actuating motor in about fourteen pieces on the roadside.
So much for being good with cars.
@Mods, please don’t delete this. It’s a valuable lesson.
I started my self hosting journey a bit over a year ago. Now I host and maintain multiple services for me and my family. 1000% absolutely could not have set it all up without ChatGPT. Just no way.
Thing is, I’m not a computer beginner. I’d confidently say I’m a moderately advanced computer user with a decent understanding of Linux/BSD and POSIX shell. I used ChatGPT to learn how to set things up gradually. Yes, things did break a couple of times and I spent a few late nights fixing them, but I never ran commands that I knew were irreversible until I fully understood what they did. This cautiousness comes with experience.
So, unlike many, I do encourage the use of ChatGPT for assisting with computer related projects, just know your abilities and don’t trust the robot unconditionally.
I support this!! 👍
AI is a tool like a hammer, you can hit a steel nail with it or a finger nail. It depends completely on you. Don’t be fooled by its “thinking” ability…
By the time you ask AI you could just read the docs
AI is so much faster than reading docs. And you get context specific responses that you can drill into. When used correctly it’s very useful.
This was using it… incorrectly though…
Totally agree. The docs don’t talk back and can’t clarify specifics or uncertainty. I always read the docs first (probably should have noted that in my first comment), but often I’d have specific questions or concerns regarding unintended affects on other services on my sever etc.
I’d never JUST run with AI to set something up. But it’s like having someone sit with you who knows what they’re doing, but dont know anything about your existing setup. So asking questions while also explaining my current setup, and pasting in and errors or warnings, is what made it useful for me.
I know some people think you should just learn from docs alone. That’s fine. My anecdotal comment was only highlighting how I was finally able to do something outside my knowledge and skillset because I had specific contextual help from AI.
I did both 🙏
Im on the same boat. Especiakly claude opus 4.5 writes better scripts in 20s than i could in 2 hours of web search and debugging
For critical baremetal/live situations i will use the docs and/or use AI for debugging help only.
Sometimes, if it’s something I am quite unfamiliar with, I’ll pull of 3 or 4 AI and give them the same directive, just to see how each interpret the data.
Per this forum post, you might just need to reboot. This was the first link that came up when I searched for your error. In the future, turn to documentation and the forums/support for the software rather than a dumb text generator.
I’m confident this is recoverable. Can you throw the failing drive into a USB enclosure? It might be easier to reformat the drive in the OS you’re most familiar with.
And don’t feel bad about breaking things, that’s the best way to learn! I’ve been breaking things long before ChatGPT came along.
Most of what I know, which is not a a huge repository of intellect, I learned thusly:
SAS drive. If you know of a usb-SAS enclosure, I’d like one.
USB enclosures for SAS drives are available
Thanks for the uplifting words
I’ve connected to drive to another PC running Linux Mint 22, and the disks app can see the drive but no actions can be done on it. And Gparted can’t even read it lol.
Any ideas?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/69fbf432-82e7-4b46-b661-db903ffcb82f.avif">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/5a529f51-a8d6-42d5-919c-4d544b293cf3.avif">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/8a9680b7-a0e7-40a8-876c-17e751060caf.avif">
How do you have the SAS drive connected to your Mint 22 box (what exact adapter/controller)? Is it going through a real SAS HBA (LSI/Broadcom-style, IT/HBA mode), or through a RAID controller / USB-SAS bridge / “virtual” adapter?
Reason I’m asking: there are basically two connection paths:
Given the screen shots I believe it’s the later. Can someone smarter than me confirm?
Thanks for the reply,
It is an LSI card, the same one that was in my truenas server.
This one bought here
Edit: also the command that bricked the drive was me using sg_format with --size==512
Is that the same formatting solution you were mentioning ? Is it different?
Am I the only one who has no idea what their problem is now? Just that there was an error about DIF but… What’s the issue now?
The drive got whipped and apparently you’re not supposed to wipe a SAS drive like a normal SATA one …
Oh, it was just sitting there and “got wiped”? Not because of a command you ran?
Sorry to be snarky but when asking for help you need to provide what you did, what error message you see now or what you expect to happen and what is actually happening. Also what OS you’re using would be helpful.
Presumably you should be able to get the drive back into a usable state - but I’m not familiar with SAS drives.
Mb, I meant I wiped the drive…
I am using Truenas CE
Oh dear God, what were you thinking? Why did you turn to chatgbt knowing that you could have actually found a website that told you what to do correctly written by someone who actually did it before?
And what have we learned?
All together: Don’t blindy copy/past from the internet OR from AI !
You said it correctly: ‘from the internet’.
I would strongly recommend against using AI
<img alt="" src="https://lemmynsfw.com/pictrs/image/8aac82f7-99c6-40cb-aee9-e831b551e21e.gif">
Right now there isn’t enough information to conclude that the drive is “bricked”.
sg_format on a SAS drive with DIF enabled can absolutely make the disk temporarily unusable to the OS if the format parameters no longer match what the HBA/driver expects, but that is very different from a dead drive.
To make any determination, more data is required. At minimum (boot with a live Linux USB drive if you are unable to get to this information):
Please provide verbatim output from:
Also specify:
Common possibilities (none can be confirmed without logs):
Things that are usually recoverable on SAS drives:
Actual permanent bricking from sg_format alone is rare unless firmware flashing or vendor-specific commands were involved.
Until logs are posted, all anyone can honestly say is:
The drive is not currently usable, but there is no evidence yet that it is permanently damaged.
If you can share this information it might be possible to get the drive back online, though I make no promises.
(edit typos)
Thank you for helping! Like I said I’m a complete beginner with little knowledge of all this, means a lot 🤗
just so you know I connected the drive to my dell pc, so its just the one broken drive not all 6.
Exact drive model: SEAGATE ST4000NM0023 XMGG
HBA model and firmware: lspci | grep -i raid 00:17.0 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation SATA Controller [RAID mode] Its an LSI card Bought it here
Kernel version / distro: I was using Truenas when I formatted it. Now trouble shooting on other PC got (6.8.0-38-generic), Linux Mint 22
Whether the controller supports DIF/DIX (T10 PI): output of lspci -vv
Whether other identical drives still work in the same slot/cable: yes all the other 5 drives worked when i set up a RAIDZ2 and a couple of them are exact same model of HDD
COMMANDS This is what I got for each command: verbatim output from
Edit: from LM22, output of sudo sg_format -vv /dev/sda
I really appreciate your knowledge and help 🙂
Let me know if anything else is needed
Thanks for the additional details, that helps, but there are still some critical gaps that prevent a proper diagnosis.
Two important points first:
The dmesg output needs to be complete, from boot until the moment the affected drive is first detected.
What you posted is cut short and misses the most important part: the SCSI/SAS negotiation, protection information handling, block size reporting, and any sense errors when the kernel first sees the disk.
Please reboot, then run as root or use sudo:
dmesg -T > dmesg-full.txt
Do not filter or truncate it. Upload the full file.
All diagnostic commands must be run with sudo/root, otherwise capabilities, mode pages, and protection features may not be visible or may be incomplete.
Specifically, please re-run and provide full output (verbatim) of the following, all with sudo or as root, on the problem drive and (if possible) on a working identical drive for comparison:
sudo lspci -nnkvv
sudo lsblk -o NAME,MODEL,SIZE,PHY-SeC,LOG-SeC,ROTA
sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdX
sudo sg_inq -vv /dev/sdX
sudo sg_readcap -ll /dev/sdX
sudo sg_modes -a /dev/sdX
sudo sg_vpd -a /dev/sdX
Replace /dev/sdX with the correct device name as it appears at that moment.
Why this matters:
The Intel SATA controller you listed is not the LSI HBA. We need to see exactly which controller the drive is currently attached to and what features the kernel believes it supports.
That Seagate model is a 520/528-capable SAS drive with DIF/T10 PI support. If it was formatted with protection enabled and is now attached to a controller/driver path that does not expect DIF, Linux will report I/O errors even though the drive itself is fine.
sg_format -vv output alone does not tell us the current logical block size, protection type, or mode page state.
Important clarification:
Formatting the drive under TrueNAS (with a proper SAS HBA) and then attaching it to a different system/controller is a very common way to trigger exactly this situation.
This is still consistent with a recoverable configuration mismatch, not a permanently damaged disk.
Once we have:
Full boot-time dmesg
Root-level SCSI inquiry, mode pages, and read capacity
Confirmation of which controller is actually in use
…it becomes possible to say concretely whether the drive needs:
Reformatting to 512/4096 with protection disabled
A controller that supports DIF
Or if there is actual media or firmware failure (less likely)
At this point, the drive is “unusable”, not proven “bricked”. The missing data is the deciding factor.
One more important thing to verify, given the change of machines:
Please confirm whether the controller in the original TrueNAS system is the same type of LSI/Broadcom SAS HBA as the one in the current troubleshooting system.
This matters because:
DIF/T10 PI is handled by the HBA and driver, not just the drive.
A drive formatted with protection information on one controller may appear broken when moved to a different controller that does not support (or is not configured for) DIF.
Many onboard SATA/RAID controllers and some HBAs will enumerate a DIF-formatted drive but fail all I/O.
If the original TrueNAS machine used:
then the best recovery path may be to put the drive back into that original system and either:
Reformat it there with protection disabled, or
Access it normally if the controller and OS were already DIF-aware
If the original controller was different:
Please provide lspci -nnkvv output from that system as well (using sudo or run as root)
And confirm the exact HBA model and firmware used in the TrueNAS SAS controller
At the moment, the controller change introduces an unknown that can fully explain the symptoms by itself. Verifying controller parity between systems is necessary before assuming the drive itself is at fault.
(edit:)
One last thing, how long did you let sg_format run for?
It can take hours to complete one percent if the drive is large, probably a full day or more considering the capacity of your drive.
I was just wondering if it might have been cut short for some reason and just needs to be restarted on the original hardware to complete the process and bring the drive back online.
Thanks for the continued support! ❤
I’ve attached an identical Segate SAS drive from the server.
To confirm, it is the same LSI card that was in the TrueNAS server. I pulled it out of the server and put it into the trouble shooting machine, where I run the commands.
It is this one: 01:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller [0107]: Broadcom / LSI SAS2308 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [1000:0087] (rev 05)
I did not see your other reply lol, I will also try this command that you recommended:
sudo sg_format –format –size=512 –fmtpinfo=0 –pfu=0 /dev/sdb
Also, the sg_format ran for less than 5 minutes, very quick. However, if I can recall, it did say it was completed.
**Note: ** “Bricked Drive” turned to sdb
Identical working drive installed as sda
Here is the dmesg -T > dmesg-full.txt with the identical drive
Here is the code from: (with the output for each drive, separately)
sudo lspci -nnkvv
sudo lsblk -o NAME,MODEL,SIZE,PHY-SeC,LOG-SeC,ROTA
sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdX
sudo sg_inq -vv /dev/sdX
sudo sg_readcap -ll /dev/sdX
sudo sg_modes -a /dev/sdX
sudo sg_vpd -a /dev/sdX
Thanks again for all the help, I await your reply. :)
I will let you know the results of (sudo sg_format –format –size=512 –fmtpinfo=0 –pfu=0 /dev/sdb), as soon as it’s done.
Thanks for the update, that’s helpful.
Confirming that the controller is a Broadcom / LSI SAS2308 and that it’s the same HBA that was used in the original TrueNAS system removes one major variable. It means the drive is now being tested under the same controller path it was previously attached to.
The device mapping you described is clear:
sda = known-good identical drive
sdb = the problematic drive
Running:
sudo sg_format --format --size=512 --fmtpinfo=0 --pfu=0 /dev/sdbas you did is the correct next step to normalize the drive’s format and protection settings.
A few general notes while this is in progress:
At this point it makes sense to pause any further investigation until the current sg_format has fully completed and the system has been power-cycled.
Once that’s done, the next step will be a direct comparison between sdb and the known-good sda using:
sudo sg_readcap -llaReported logical and physical sector sizes
Protection / PI status
As a general note going forward: on Linux / FreeBSD it’s safer to reference disks by persistent identifiers (e.g. /dev/disk/by-id/ or UUID (this is safer but not so direct human readable) on Linux or glabel on FreeBSD) rather than /dev/sdX, as device names can change across boots or hardware reordering as you have had some experience with now.
Post the results when you’re ready and the sg_format complete and we can continue from there.
Great News!
Format completed and now the drive is viewable in “Disks” (however it is still unknown compared to the other one, it might just need a normal format.
The code for the comparison returns invalid option, I assumed you need just -l comparison:
sudo sg_readcap -l /dev/sdb and sudo sg_readcap -l /dev/sda
One question I have is: what do you mean by powercycle? Is that another command to run on the problematic drive? If you mean turn off the pc and turn it back on, I will do that right now, just after the drive has completed formatting.
After PowerCycle (turned pc off and on)
sudo sg_readcap -l /dev/sdb and sudo sg_readcap -l /dev/sda
Would the next step be formatting of some kind?
That’s good news — what you’re seeing now is the expected state.
A quick clarification first:
Power cycle means exactly what you did: shut the machine down completely and turn it back on. There is no command involved. You did the right thing.
Regarding the current status:
The drive showing up in Disks but marked as unknown is normal
At this point the disk has:
No partition table
No filesystem
“Unknown” here does not indicate a problem, only that nothing has been created on it yet
About sg_readcap:
sg_readcap -l is correctThere is no direct “comparison” mode; running it separately on sda and sdb is exactly what was intended
The important thing is that both drives now report sane, consistent values (logical block size, capacity, no protection enabled)
Next steps:
Yes, the next step is normal disk setup, just like with any new drive:
Create a partition table (GPT is typical)
Create one or more partitions
Create a filesystem (or add it back into ZFS if that’s your goal)
At this stage the drive has transitioned from “unusable” to functionally recovered. From here on, you’re no longer fixing a problem — you’re just provisioning storage.
If you plan to put it back into TrueNAS/ZFS, it’s usually best to let TrueNAS handle partitioning and formatting itself rather than doing it manually on Linux.
Nice work sticking with the process and verifying things step by step.
Oh my what a ride! I got everything up and running in a RAIDZ2 with the 6 x 4TB drives! (soon i will add another 4 x 1tb in an icy dock as a separate vdev)
Everything works now with no errors! 🥳
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/15383a4a-d8f0-4188-ad6e-580b7915caac.avif">
I could not have fixed this without your help. You are a lifesaver and probably saved this drive from the landfill lol. I honestly can’t thank you enough for your continuous support throughout many days!
You are the light that shows that there are still good people on the internet that want to help, and not just lurkers that laugh and move on and treat everything as content instead of a person on the other side sharing something that is important to them.
In my case I was in need of help, and like one comment put it: Out of the 50 messages of ridicule, one person will actually go out of their way and help.
I learned soo much and a good lesson too!
Thanks again for your help, and I will remember this interaction for the rest of my self-hosting journey! I’m serious.
Keep helping others and sharing your knowledge. I will pay this kind gesture forward in the new year, and help others more with the things that I know. 🫡
(Please don’t delete this convo, might help someone in the future)
Thanks again and Happy Holidays!
I wish you all the best in the New Year! 🤗 🎉
That’s genuinely great to hear, and I’m glad it worked out.
You did the hard part here: you kept testing methodically, provided solid data, and were willing to slow down and verify assumptions instead of guessing. That’s why this ended in a clean recovery instead of a dead drive.
For what it’s worth, I’ve hit more than a few of these bumps myself. I started out self-taught on an IBM XT back in 1987, when I was about six years old, and the learning process has never really stopped. Situations like this are just part of how you build real understanding over time.
This is also a good example of how enterprise hardware behaves very differently from consumer gear. Nothing here was “obvious” as a beginner, and the outcome reinforces an important lesson: unusable does not mean broken. You handled it the right way.
I’m especially glad if this thread is kept around. These kinds of issues come up regularly, and having a complete, factual troubleshooting trail will help the next person who runs into the same thing.
Enjoy the RAIDZ2 setup, and good luck with the additional vdev. Paying this forward is exactly how these communities stay useful.
Happy holidays, and all the best in the new year. 🥳
Sorry for the mess with replies.
Please see the last comment I made on my own comment instead of yours where it should have been.
Your drive is almost certainly not dead, you just need a T10 / DIF capable controller to disable the PROTECTION flag.
Read more in the other post.
One more hopefully happy update:
Based on everything you’ve shown so far in the information you have given, the most probable cause is that the drive was formatted with T10 DIF / Protection Information enabled (
PROTECT=1), and you are now accessing it through a controller path that does not support DIF.This is a very common failure mode with enterprise SAS drives and
sg_format.(edit: oh, how I am in a love/hate relationship with my brain on delayed thoughts…)
In your paste from sg_format you can see this flag:
sudo sg_format -vv /dev/sda open /dev/sda with flags=0x802 inquiry cdb: [12 00 00 00 24 00] SEAGATE ST4000NM0023 XMGG peripheral_type: disk [0x0] PROTECT=1(end of edit)
What this means in practice:
PROTECT=1= the drive was formatted with DIF Type 1This is not bricking. It is a configuration mismatch.
How to fix it (most reliable path)
You need to connect the drive to a DIF-capable SAS HBA (LSI/Broadcom, same type as originally used if possible).
Best option is to do this on the original hardware, even via a USB live Linux environment.
Once the drive is on a T10-capable controller, reformat it with protection disabled.
Example (this will ERASE the drive and might take a LONG time to complete):
sudo sg_format –format –size=512 –fmtpinfo=0 –pfu=0 /dev/sdX
Key flags:
–fmtpinfo=0→ disables DIF / PROTECT–size=512(or 4096 if you prefer standard 4K)–pfu=0(disables PROTECTION flag, your GPT forgot to include this which actually disables the protection)/dev/sdXAfter this completes and the system is power-cycled, the drive should behave like a normal disk again on non-DIF controllers.
Important notes
sg_formatalone almost never permanently damages SAS drivesIf you cannot access a T10-capable controller, the drive may remain unusable on that system, but still be perfectly recoverable elsewhere.
A case of a user with another problem but where he needed to disable DIF, got it fixed after a new format with these parameters (from Google):
https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/drives-formatted-with-type-1-protection-eventually-lead-to-data-loss.86007/
There are so many things wrong here, people don’t even have the bandwidth to complain about how the blurry, off-angle, fucking ROTATED photos of a screen contribute to this absolute dumpster fire of a post. Just trying to do my part.
Don’t forget about the glare
Thank you, I did forget the glare.
OP, I am sorry that I cannot offer any immediate solution to your issue. However, if I may, pass along a bit of advice I learned long ago, and it has nothing to do with AI. TAKE PROLIFIC NOTES!!! It is tedious, it is work, but it will save your ass in the long run. Write everything down. Don’t be lulled into the mindset that you will be able to remember each and every thing you’ve done to the server, especially when you’re breaking new ground in your selfhosting journey. 9 times out of 10, you won’t. Then when you are successful with your endeavors, go back, clean up your notes, and store them for future reference.
I very much wish I’d done this. I’m very happy with my system but it’ll be a slog if and when I need to set it up again.
It doesn’t really need to be tedious… My notes are jokey, full of profanity, sarcasm, and self deprecating humor
for context, these are my personal notes for my personal machine. These will never be shared with anyone else, and nobody else has to try to read them or make sense of them (well… sometimes I make chatbot read my notes in order to train it on whatever I need help troubleshooting)
Before I started keeping a hot_log.txt file every single install of Linux I ever ran was a unique snowflake and no two systems were ever the same
I meant tedious, as in, it takes some effort to pause, write the shit down, and then proceed on. I can only speak for myself, but when I’m in the zone doing something, excitement can overshadow note taking. So, I have to make myself document line by line. But, yeah I have entries like ‘Before proceeding, make sure you do _____ , dumbass!’ LOL
So worse than tedious
No, you fried your drive, by listening to CGPT. Also learn how to take a screenshot.
You should have clicked on the “get smarter responses” button…
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I am going now, good luck.
ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
Don’t trust a chatbot.
I notice that you used the free interface without registration. While a bit of a hassle to register, I saw that behind the registration wall they use longer contexts/bigger models. Without registration it’s more prone to abuse so they might condense/truncate responses from chats: by design, the bots have zero memory, so the whole chat history needs to be appended at every question => long chats lead to expensive API calls => free users get history truncated or condensed.
Also, the normal system prompt is something like “be a sycophant and always please the user no matter prompt” and it will lead you do stupid stuff if you ask, so you need to go to the settings and change it to something like:
For example this question that i had: (all paragraphed, writing from memory, i routinely wipe all the chat histories)
gpt-5-mini from chatgpt free:
gpt-5.2 from api with the previous system prompt:
finally, don’t blindly trust the results as they might still be incorrect, use that as a hint on how to proceed