So I'm having a rather difficult time finding the correct place on the internet to ask this about. I think maybe this forum on Tom's Hardware can help me. If this is not the correct place, and you know a better place, please direct me there!
Basically, I have five hard drives in my server computer, one 1TB hard drive and four 3TB hard drives. I purchased all four 3TB hard drives about 4 months ago with the intention of setting up a RAID. I have only been using one of the 3TB drives to store data on and haven't touched the other three drives until recently (they've just been in the computer hooked to the power/SATA ports).
As you can see, they are /dev/sda - /dev/sde. The computer correctly recognizes two of the 3TB hard drives as being 3TB hard drives (and the partition tables on them). However two of the 3TB hard drives do not have valid partition tables.
So, upon investigating this, the first thing I did was open parted to attempt to create a GPT disk label and create a partition on the disks.
When using parted (see above) I tell it to create a disk label, and it doesn't report an error. However, it doesn't create the disk label either. When I tell it to print the partition table, it just prints that the disk label is unrecognized.
I have done some reading, and it appears that the first 512 bytes of a hard drive are what's used to define the disk label and the partition table. So, I used dd to read the first 512 bytes of the disk.
It appears that everything is set to hex of 0xff (or, in other words, every bit is set to 1). Very peculiar. So, I then follow this up with executing a dd to write all 0's to the first 512 bytes.
And follow that up with a dd to read the first 512 bytes again
From here on, I don't have example command output as these are things I have done in the past, but I will attempt to explain them in as much detail as possible. If needed, I will go back through the process and produce output.
However that doesn't appear to have made a difference. So at this point, I think there's something wrong with my hard drives. I took them out of the Linux computer and put them into my main desktop computer. From there, it is actually able to recognize the hard drives and I am able to successfully create a GPT label and even add a partition to it! So the hard drives do not appear to actually be bad! Taking the hard drives back from my Windows computer and putting them back in my Linux computer, both fdisk and parted are able to list the partitions, and dd is able to read that the first 512 bytes contains data.
I then used parted to delete the existing two partitions that Windows created (one that was a few MB and one NTFS that spanned the rest of the disk). However, upon attempting to remove a partition, I all of a sudden got the "unrecognized disk label" error again. Exiting out of parted and using dd resulted in all of the first 512 bytes being set to 0xff.
Things I have tried so far:
All of which has not worked.
Here's the information about the computer:
Does anyone know why Linux appears to be unable to correctly write to the hard drives, but Windows appears to have no problem reading and writing to/from the drives?
Thank you in advance for any help!
Basically, I have five hard drives in my server computer, one 1TB hard drive and four 3TB hard drives. I purchased all four 3TB hard drives about 4 months ago with the intention of setting up a RAID. I have only been using one of the 3TB drives to store data on and haven't touched the other three drives until recently (they've just been in the computer hooked to the power/SATA ports).
As you can see, they are /dev/sda - /dev/sde. The computer correctly recognizes two of the 3TB hard drives as being 3TB hard drives (and the partition tables on them). However two of the 3TB hard drives do not have valid partition tables.
So, upon investigating this, the first thing I did was open parted to attempt to create a GPT disk label and create a partition on the disks.
When using parted (see above) I tell it to create a disk label, and it doesn't report an error. However, it doesn't create the disk label either. When I tell it to print the partition table, it just prints that the disk label is unrecognized.
I have done some reading, and it appears that the first 512 bytes of a hard drive are what's used to define the disk label and the partition table. So, I used dd to read the first 512 bytes of the disk.
It appears that everything is set to hex of 0xff (or, in other words, every bit is set to 1). Very peculiar. So, I then follow this up with executing a dd to write all 0's to the first 512 bytes.
And follow that up with a dd to read the first 512 bytes again
From here on, I don't have example command output as these are things I have done in the past, but I will attempt to explain them in as much detail as possible. If needed, I will go back through the process and produce output.
However that doesn't appear to have made a difference. So at this point, I think there's something wrong with my hard drives. I took them out of the Linux computer and put them into my main desktop computer. From there, it is actually able to recognize the hard drives and I am able to successfully create a GPT label and even add a partition to it! So the hard drives do not appear to actually be bad! Taking the hard drives back from my Windows computer and putting them back in my Linux computer, both fdisk and parted are able to list the partitions, and dd is able to read that the first 512 bytes contains data.
I then used parted to delete the existing two partitions that Windows created (one that was a few MB and one NTFS that spanned the rest of the disk). However, upon attempting to remove a partition, I all of a sudden got the "unrecognized disk label" error again. Exiting out of parted and using dd resulted in all of the first 512 bytes being set to 0xff.
Things I have tried so far:
■ I have removed the hard drives and swapped the SATA port being used with the SATA port of one of the hard drives that works, thinking maybe a couple of my SATA ports were not working properly
■ I have placed both hard drives into an external USB hard drive enclosure and connected the enclosure to the computer
All of which has not worked.
Here's the information about the computer:
■ Motherboard: GigaByte GA-990FXA-UD5
■ OS: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-27-generic x86_64)
■ RAM: Crucial Ballistic Sport 32GB (8GBx4) DDR3 1600 MT/s
■ All four 3TB hard drives: Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001-1CH166
Does anyone know why Linux appears to be unable to correctly write to the hard drives, but Windows appears to have no problem reading and writing to/from the drives?
Thank you in advance for any help!
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