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Trying to re-use some drives with no success (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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I have 4 old hard drives that I pulled from an old Drobo that needs to be trashed. I bought a Mediasonic 4-bay RAID enclosure that I thought would be a good upgrade, but knew going into that the drives may not work because the manual for the new enclosure specifically says to use new drives to avoid problems. The exact product is this Mediasonic one.

I don't care about the existing data on these drives, and that was originally what I thought was meant by "avoiding problems". So I tried just putting the drives in to no avail. They don't show up as drives in the file explorer. They don't show up in "Disks".

I also have an external hard drive dock - the 15 year old version of this one which does let me mount the drives and see them in Disks.

I have tried running "wipefs -a" and I've tried formatting them in Disks with no filesystem specified. I've also run parted on them, but anything I try in parted gives me the error "unrecognised disk label".

If I can't reuse these old drives then the enclosure is of less use to me than I had hoped as I don't intend to buy new drives any time soon.

Is there anything else I can try to reset these drives to a state where they'll act like new drives that have never been used before?

Update: The "tricks" haven't worked so I'm doing the full disk write using dd. It'll be a while before I have 2 disks prepped to try.

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[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

You might want to use dd to just copy zeros to fill the drive at the device level. Takes time but will delete the data.

Another option is to hardware erase. I think hdparm can do that but it is a bit tricky.

Another method is to use blkdiscard if it is say an SSD or another drive with that sort of funtionality.

Just make sure your referencing the correct block device with any of these methods as they are pretty destructive operations.

Edit: With dd it might be good enough just to erase the leading and trailing 1MiB of the drive. The partition and backup partition info is usually there.

Edit: Drives can also have drive firmware level locking and passwords. I think hdparm can play with those too.

[–] Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

hdparm wouldn't let me run the security-erase or security-erase-enhanced commands. It was indicating an IO failure. I thought maybe that was due to me not giving the drive a file system so I went back to Disks and gave it one, but still no luck. When I give it a file system the drive mounts though, so no actual hardware issues that I can see.

I found a thread on another site about using dd to remove the last 1-10MB of a RAID disk in order to make their RAID appliance see the drives as unconfigured. That's basically what I'm trying to do here so I followed those instructions but this Mediasonic bay is still not coming to life with the old drives. I might be at the point of sending it back and looking for something else.

Just for completeness, the command used to wipe the end of the drive is as follows where you specify the amount to wipe using the "mb" variable and you change /dev/sdX to the correct drive. From a thread on Stack Exchange.

disk=/dev/sdX && mb=10 && dd if=/dev/zero of=$disk bs=512 count=$(( 2048 * $mb )) seek=$(( $(blockdev --getsz $disk) - 2048 * $mb ))

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Hint. The secure erase commands are challenging. First you have to hot attach the drive. If you boot with drive connected it will be locked usually plus there is usually a timeout where it locks too. Then you have to use the correct security commands to unlock the drive for erase to work.