Is this the place to talk about how disks report wrong sizes when troubleshooting them outside the scope of the raid they was in?
Because I am looking for such a place any this site turned up in my searches.
@Sorak :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
The real size of single or RAIDed HDDs/SSDs will not be changed, when you insert them into another system. The only thing, which may happen is, that the new environment cannot see the complete size of a RAID array (due to a not compatible RAID Option ROM module within its BIOS).
Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Ok, saludos chaval…Spanish)
Lets take this further.
This happens to me frequently, I remove a drive from an existing Raid, in order to either replace it or as a step in re configuring something, like changing size of the Raid, or changing Raid type. For my NAS I have noticed that it uses EXT4. Which makes me want to reformat the drive in order to use it in a Windows environment, for whatever reason.
Example, right now I have a Seagate Barracuda 3TB drive, that reports 2,7 TB in the NAS I use, all good, but when in Windows it only reports 746,52 GB. It may report additional partitions, which I remove and try to format to get back the missing 2TB, but nothing seems to help.
I get Seatools and have a go at wiping, erasing, resetting… any of the tools I find, but no. The drive reports correct size within Seatools, but no matter what I do with it I am unable to get back those missing 2TB in Windows Disk Management.
See my problem?
I have tried putting it back to the NAS to reconfigure it, but the NAS only has options for creating different kinds of RAIDS, there is no option to get back a disk to factory state, so to speak. I guess the NAS Raid card may have some limitations in functionality.
Any ideas? Should I boot a Gparted session? Is there any obscure disk commands I can use in Windows to reset the drive? Frankly I am at a loss here.
@Sorak :
Before you can remove a member or all members of an existing RAID array, you should remove it from the existing RAID array or deleted the array completely. After having inserted the related HDDs or SSDs into another PC, you can recreate the RAID array (provided, that the new environment detects the designed RAID members and allows the creation of such RAID array).
Another option to erase the track0 of the RAID array, which contains the partition scheme and its details, is to safely erase all data by using a specific tool like Parted Magic.
Your specific problerm seems to be caused by the different partition schemes (MBR resp. GPT) of the source and target systems. Only the Guimode Partition Table (GPT) supports >2 TB HDD/SSD Volumes.
Yeah well, I am aware of a lot of that. Thing is my NAS do not let me delete Raid or remove drives, only recreate in to another Raid configuration. Thus some of the issues. On my Server I have more abilities since it has a better Raid card.
@Sorak :
If your PC systems are not compatible with each other (different partition schemes, completely different RAID Controllers or/and RAID BIOS modules), you should not move any RAID array member from one system to the other.
I am not doing that as you describe it. But I am re-using drives where I can.
Before you are going to re-use them, you should do a safely erasure of the data (incl. track0).
Yup I do.
And then is where I stumble over the available space reporting issues.
To avoid this issue you have to format all RAID array members with the GPT scheme.
Which is not helping with the drive I wrote as example.
Are we talking in circles?
i’ve run into this issue myself. windows seems to have issues with non fat/NTFS/modified filesystems or just raid metadata stored on the drive
i have used linux based util disks and used those utils/commands to fully erase all partitions then reformat the drive to NTFS/FAT without rebooting
the linux gpart command is what i usually use as it seems to create a generic vanilla NTFS partition better than windows does but i have also resolved this under windows by completely erasing the HDD, then creating a new “Partition Table”, and then reformatting to NFTS the key seems to be doing both steps in the correct order without rebooting/ power cycling the drive
hope this helps
Edit: forgot to mention the windows command to remove partition info from a drive is "diskpart"
read the link below on how to use it
https://www.howtogeek.com/215349/how-to-…ive-in-windows/