Score:0

RAID card made hard drives unusable (locked?)

bd flag
Kip

I have two 4TB Western Digital hard drives (WD4000FYYZ) that I added to my 22.04 system. Running lsblk showed them as /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd. I formatted them as ext4 drives, mounted them, and they both seemed to work fine.

Later I found a RAID controller card and decided to use them with that. After installing the card and connecting the two drives to it, I used the card's BIOS to create a RAID1 array, and that seemed to finish successfully.

After starting Ubuntu again, I expected to see a single device for the RAID array, but the two drives were still detected as separate drives. I decided to go back to using them separately. I powered down, removed the RAID card, and reconnected the two drives as before.

Now I can't seem to use either drive. Any command I try (e.g. fdisk -l, dd, mkfs.ext4, etc.) yields an I/O error. I tried running hdparm -I against both of them, and they both show as "locked".

I'm guessing the RAID card did something to the drives that rendered them unusable as normal drives. If that's correct, how do I undo that?

Score:0
ca flag

Without knowing anything about your raid controller....

Most often the very first portion of a disk contains the partitioning information, if you clear that data, then it becomes "new" - i.e. having no initialized metadata storage (= list of content).

This can be done most simply by writing 1MB of data from /dev/zero onto the beginning of the disk.

e.g. create an "ISO" with dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1 of=/tmp/none.ISO
Then use Disks (gnome-disks from shell) and "restore" it to the disk in question

  • NOTE: make sure it is the RIGHT / CORRECT DISK.
Kip avatar
bd flag
Kip
Hello. Tried the procedure you suggested. When I attempted to restore the image, a popup appeared in Disks: "Error restoring disk image Error writing 1048576 bytes to offset 0: Input/output error (g-io-error-quark, 0)
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