SATA Hard drives disappear after use with mdadm

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sd_iconoclast
Posts: 12
Joined: 2014/02/28 23:23:19

SATA Hard drives disappear after use with mdadm

Post by sd_iconoclast » 2023/04/09 17:19:13

Yesterday I bought two brand new Seagate 2TB SATA hard drives and set about using mdadm to create a RAID 1 array.
I had change their partition types to "fd", and used mdadm --create in order to create a new RAID array.
"mdadm --create" finished without errors. I then executed "mdadm -E" and the computer locked up. I had to do a hard reboot.
This lockup might have been due to something else. My boot hard drive is removable and i had to pull it out and reinsert it before the computer would boot.
After booting, my new hard drives have become undetectable. The BIOS cant see them and neither can lsblk, fdisk, or anything else.
Does anyone have any idea what has happened to my hard drives?

lightman47
Posts: 1521
Joined: 2014/05/21 20:16:00
Location: Central New York, USA

Re: SATA Hard drives disappear after use with mdadm

Post by lightman47 » 2023/04/09 18:51:46

I recently installed (2) 16 tb drives on RHEL 8 using mdadm and didn't experience what you did.
I used as a guide: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ ... #Assemble

I found out what they were named (think using lsblk) and then used that info with the "Create" section of that guide.

I substituted my name "RAID-1" for 'name' (will investigate later how to change the name), as well as the correct /dev/sd ids!.

Code: Select all

mdadm --create /dev/md/name /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2
I was very pleasantly surprised when these data drives not only "survived", but were immediately recognized as "RAID-1" after I clean installed RHEL9 and mdadm - wiping out RHEL 8.

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