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Thanks for helping out. Some time ago I got two 400GB NetApp drives for use in my Poweredge server. I attempted for a while to get them to work but they would not join a RAID disk group. I found this is because the drives have been formatted with 520 byte sector size, and they need to be 512 bytes. I attempted to format the drives but I cannot access them within the stored operating system (Proxmox) or a live USB of Mint or Ubuntu.

I'm looking for some way to somehow directly access these drives from some Linux system so I can run the necessary commands to format the drive sector sizes, but if there's a better way to do that I'm open to suggestions.

The only way I can access these drives are through the front hard drive slots of my server. I have no other device that allows SAS đrives. Unless there's some way inside the server, which there did not appear to be but I could have glanced over it.

I've tried for a while to get the SAS NetApp drives to work but to of no avail, so I'm hoping that any of you can give me hints or help me out, feel free to ask questions. Thanks again.

Matthew Evan
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  • Questions seeking installation, configuration or diagnostic help must include the desired end state, the specific problem or error, sufficient information about the configuration and environment to reproduce it, and attempted solutions. Questions without a clear problem statement are not useful to other readers and are unlikely to get good answers. – djdomi May 23 '22 at 05:57
  • I need to format two drives with 520 byte size sectors to 512 byte size sectors so I can use them in a Dell Poweredge r410, but I cannot directly access the drives in order to format them and need to find a way to do that. My desired end result is having these drives mounted in any way on my Proxmox system. I've tried directly accessing them in the operating system (does not appear), and adding to a RAID via the bios (fails). – Matthew Evan May 25 '22 at 04:02

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It sounds like from your comment

I've tried directly accessing them in the operating system (does not appear), and adding to a RAID via the bios

you do have a system was a SAS connection that allows you to talk to the drives. If they aren't showing up that indicates that the operating system doesn't know how to talk to them which tells me it is potentially a driver failure. I would check the output of lsscsi - if the drives show up there then you know that Linux has correctly detected them.

If they don't, then you are looking at a driver failure or a physical failure. Regarding the drivers, Linux breaks the SCSI subsystem down into three layers - upper, lower, and midlayer. The upper layer is typically what you see and in your case those drives should show up as sd something (SCSI Disk), but it might also be a generic SCSI device.

  • Try loading the generic SCSI driver and see if it shows up then. At least on RHEL, it no longer loads on boot which would explain why you aren't seeing it (if the disk shows up as a generic SCSI device)
  • Check out Pete Kokkinis' post here.

I’ve read through these 4 pages about 20 times. Here’s my experience: I purchased a few of the Hitachi HUS156060VLS600 formatted for NetApp with a 520 sector size. I had a Dell 2950 rack server in my lab with a Perc 6i Raid controller. While I could see the drives in Ctrl-R, I couldn’t do anything with them – no hot spare, no raid, nothing. I purchased a Dell H310 off ebay and had to flash it to be able to do anything with the drives. Before flashing, it would behave just like the embedded raid 6i raid controller. Here’s how I flashed the H310:

  1. Create a USB boot disk (I used Rufus, Fat32, FreeDOS). 2) Download this zip file: www.hercnetworks.com/Misc/LSI-9211-8i.zip 3) Extract and place on boot disk (I created a folder called LSI for it on my boot disk) 4) Boot using boot disk, change dir to LSI and run: megarec -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin megarec -cleanflash 0 5) Reboot. Enter boot disk again. 6) Change to LSI folder again and run: Sas2flsh -o 6gbpsas.fw

That’s it! Reboot. I had windows installed on a disk connected directly to the motherboard. Download the SG3 utilities from http://sg.danny.cz/sg/p/sg3_utils-1.42_mw64exe.zip and extract to a folder on your C drive (I did SG3). Run an admin command prompt, change to SG3, then run: sg_scan You should see your drives listed as pd0, pd1, pd2, etc. Be sure you know which drive number you want to format and run: sg_format --format --size=512 -v pd1 if that spits out an error, try: sg_format --format --size=512 –-six -v pd1

Grant Curell
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