Did I brick my HGST drive?

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This was something that I posted late last night. April 02, 2024.

I have 4x HGST 8TB drives. 2 are SAS and the remaining 2 are SATA. Three of the drives have a block size of 512 and the fourth (Sun Oracle HUH72808AL5200) has the 4096 block size.

I should mention that I, after having read some of the earllier posts in this thread,

Fixing Sun Oracle (HGST)

I decided to try my hand at converting the Sun Oracle SAS drive. This went without a hitch after issuing this command:

sg_format --format --size=4096 fmtpinfo=0 /dev/sdx

I loaded VMware ESXi 6.7.x and can see three of the drives with the 512 block size. I am wondering if it has anything to do with the Sun Oracle’s 4K block size. All drives are connected to an Adaptec ASR-71605 RAID controller set to HBA mode.

If absolutely necessary, how would I go about re-formatting the drive to 512K block size. I did try entering:

sg3_format --format --size=512 fmtpinfo-0 /dev/sdx
sg3_format --format --size=512 /dev/sdx

But neither of those commands worked. They resulted in errors. I will come back with screenshots of those error messages shortly. Your time and assistance will be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Peter

The BAD news below:

April 03, 2024. And this is how my day began. I booted up my HP Z820 and thought that I would continue where I left off last night.

The HGST SAS 8TB 4K drive that I was thinking of converting back to 512 is completely gone. It doesn’t show up in the Adaptec RAID controller ACU nor do I see it when launching Disks from my Ubuntu Live CD. It just vanished.

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The adaptec hbas don’t deal with drives that were in mid format and got interrupted. If you get your hands on an LSI hba, the drive should be recoverable just by starting and finishing the format

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Thank you for getting back to me @stuffwhy Would the interruption cause the drive to no longer be recognized by the RAID card at all. It has completely disappeared.

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Right. It won’t show up.

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Here I was about to scrap the drive. Let me see what I can find that would be compatible with both ESXi v6.7.x and / or the latest version of Unraid. I am seriously considering the switch over to Unraid. My version of ESXi is getting a little long in the tooth.

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I just found out that I can IT flash the onboard LSI2308 controller. Do you think that I should try that before spending the $$$ on an LSI 9207-8i for example?

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There’s no other way to say it. You’re a life saver. Well, a drive saver at the least. What I did was re-connect all four of my drives to the onboard LSI2309 controller of my HP Z820. I then flashed the controller with the IT BIOS / Firmware from Broadcom. Rebooted the PC, entered the LSI Raid Utility and bingo the missing drive has come back. I am now in the midst of formatting it. I am doing that from the ACU. Perhaps not the smartest thing to do but I will let it run overnight and see how that pans out. Once again, your time and assistance are greatly appreciated. Have an awesome weekend. Peter

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