Hard Disk Partitions

[Ahjohng]

I bought a set of six 2.8TB hard disks, but to my surprise, one of them comes with two partitions already: 2.05TB and 0.75TB. I am testing each disk through a USB port with each disk serving as a removable media.

What is the best tool to remove these partitions (preferably Windows based)? Or is FreeNAS smart enough to remove these partitions automatically? Please advise. Thanks.

 

[nightshade00013]

From my understanding when you create a vdev it will destroy any data or partitions on a drive.

But since you should be doing a burn in anyway it will destroy the partitions for you.

 

[joeschmuck]

I take it, these are used drives since they have a more than one partition on them. If that is true, ensure you run a full set of SMART tests on them.

There are several tools you could use in Windows however you are much safer to use a dedicated machine, like your FreeNAS machine and then just use "dd" to wipe the drives, or you could use partition magic (in the UBCD) and use that. The trick is to ONLY have drives you want to delete physically connected to your machine, which is why I like a bootable CD. These types of tools are fantastic to keep on hand.

 

[Ahjohng]

Thanks for all that try to help. After a few days, I found the solution in the following link simply by selecting GPT as the last commentator suggested. Does MBR only span 2TB?

http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/228329-merging-unallocated-space.html

 

[nightshade00013]

You're still doing things in windows which isn't really needed if they will be used in FreeNAS which is also where you should be doing your testing and burn in. FreeNAS will not work correctly with drives that are setup and formatted in windows anyway as it has NTFS read only access and will defeat the purpose of having a FreeNAS system as one of the big advantages is the use of ZFS.

You're fretting over drive size in one OS and formatting them when it's ALL going to go poof when FreeNAS sets things up correctly. It's like uninstalling software one at a time when you will format the drive in 20 minutes to install a different OS.

 

[Ahjohng]

You're still doing things in windows which isn't really needed if they will be used in FreeNAS which is also where you should be doing your testing and burn in. FreeNAS will not work correctly with drives that are setup and formatted in windows anyway as it has NTFS read only access and will defeat the purpose of having a FreeNAS system as one of the big advantages is the use of ZFS.

You're fretting over drive size in one OS and formatting them when it's ALL going to go poof when FreeNAS sets things up correctly. It's like uninstalling software one at a time when you will format the drive in 20 minutes to install a different OS.

Half a year ago, when I built my FreeNAS system with 6 used 1TB disks configured as RAID-Z2, I did notice that I had to remove all partitions for the disk arrays to be accepted by FreeNAS. Thus, I am aware that I should not touch the disks other than testing them. Recently, 2 of these disks were reporting errors, and that prompted me to take action to replace the array with 6 3TB disks. Five of these new disks were recognized as full 2.8TB, but one only showed 2.05TB with an untouchable 0.75TB unallocated section. I was not sure what was going on, but it turned out to be a Windows issue. I was overcautious since I was planning to resilver 2 disks at the same time for 3 times. The system now reports 10.8TB of storage. Would you do 2 disks at the same time in RAID-Z2?