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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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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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[–] yardy_sardley@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm gonna join in with everyone and recommend completely zeroing all the drives (make sure you unmount them before doing it). It will take a while but at least you will have drives in a known state and can eliminate that as a possible issue.

[–] Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah this is what I'm doing now. I tried all of the tricks but they aren't working. Unfortunately this dock is USB 2.0 so I think it will take quite a while. These are "only" 3TB drives, but I need to clean 2 of them before I can test. Hopefully sometime next week??? Haha.