I have a Terramaster NAS, loaded Terramaster os fine, saw disks and setup raid. Then I decided to install TrueNas Scale, but am not seeing hard drives now. I also de-partitioned them. lsblk shows nothing. what to do? thanks!
What do you mean by this?
You set SATA mode to “RAID” in the BIOS?
Do these disks contain data that you want to preserve?
Before you change SATA mode to “AHCI” in the BIOS, make sure you’re okay with starting all over again, without preserving the existing data.
Before I created a truenas boot disk, I loaded the Terramaster OS on the Terramaster 4bay NAS I bought just to see if the computer worked. It did & I setup raid with 3 4TB disks & it worked fine.
But I want to use Truenas Scale, so I swapped in a 32 gig compact usb stick & installed Truenas scale. However, I’m not seeing any hard drives, and I googled for why, and got the info that one should not use partitioned drives, so I removed the partitions on the hard drives.
Nothing is on the drives, I’m just starting from scratch. I can see the drives fine if I hook them up on another ubuntu box. I haven’t touched the BIOS. Do I need to set SATA mode to AHCI?
The Terramaster F4-424 NAS BIOS only has AHCI as default. No option to choose other modes.
I did successfully setup Truenas scale on an old desktop with 2 4TB hard drives mirrored and an ssd boot, without having to think about formatting of hard drives.
Are the drives listed in SCALE if you use the command lsblk ?
Are they detected in the BIOS?
Thanks winnielinnie for your help!
with lsblk on the command line, I can see the 32gig compact usb drive I created that sits inside the mobo. I can also see the 240gig nvme ssd. But I don’t see any hard drives. I have 4 4TB drives in the Terramaster drive bays.
In the BIOS, Adanvced Sata Configuration page I see:
Sata Mode AHCI (only choice)
Sata Test Mode (disabled)
Sata Port 1 Empty
Sata Port (Enabled)
Sata Port 2 Empty
M.2 Port (Enabled)
Before I setup Truenas Scale, I setup Terramaster TOS, the OS that comes with the NAS by default. I just stuck in the hard drives and the TOS saw them and I striped them RaidZ1 with their software.
But after I installed Truenas Scale on a new thumb drive, I’m not seeing the hard drives, even after I removed all the partitions using GParted on ubuntu on another box.
What model drives are these?
That your BIOS claims the ports are “empty” means there’s nothing further that SCALE can do to detect them.
HGST Ultrastars. I have a desktop with 2 of these being mirrored working fine so I bought a few more to test with on the Terramaster NAS.
I also have some Seagate IronWolf NAS Enterprise Drives I intend to deploy for work. I have my own terramaster for home and to learn on with cheap 4TB drives, and another terramaster with Enterprise Seagate drives.
Have you tried letting SCALE boot up completely (without any drives inserted), and then inserting only a single drive to see if it will be detected?
No, I will pull all the drives and boot, shutdown, then insert one and boot again.
I’m not sure about hot-swapping so I will turn it off & insert the drive then boot again and report back.
TerraMasters support hot-swapping by default.
I pulled all the hard drives and rebooted into truenas on the cli.
ok, lsblk gives the usb boot drive & an nvme ssd.
Then I shutdown, put in 1 hard drive and rebooted to cli, lsblk shows the same 2 items, no hard drive.
On the old desktop HP Pavilion with Windows Vista sticker on it, that runs truenas scale with 2 of the same model 4TB drives, I think I ran smart tests on them before putting them in the desktop.
So to recap: If you try with only one harddrive inserted, it is not detected in the BIOS or lsblk in the command-line under SCALE?
This is sounding more like a hardware issue than TrueNAS itself.
Does the case’s green LED correspond to the bay which has a drive inserted?
no green LED corresponding light. I wonder if I did something inadvertent when replacing the default usb boot drive with a new one? Because I did get the initial Terramaster default TOS system working fine with 3 hard drives. I didn’t even notice the tiny light holes before.
Thank you for your analysis.
How long was the time between testing TOS and now trying with TrueNAS? If it’s been years, it might be due to a hardware component failing in that time; perhaps a capacitor or such.
If it was only within days or weeks, then I’m not sure why your TerraMaster is suddenly not detecting inserted drives.
Does the backplane look and feel secure?
Maybe a cable/connection came loose within the chassis?
Maybe the power adapter is acting up?
It’s only been a few days since I had the initial Terramaster TOS working. I will take it apart again and look at connections. The backplan feels secure & looks fine. I will swap out another Terramaster to start playing with. Start a new one from scratch just to compare.
Thanks for your debugging assistance!
I know you said you didn’t change anything in the BIOS, but you can also try a non-invasive approach to rule something out. Reset the BIOS to factory settings, and see if that resolves the drive detection issue.
Thanks, I will reset the BIOS. Basically I assumed it was working, so mess with things as little as possible going forward.
There was a BOOT to TOS I turned off. Since I wasn’t using Terramasters TOS, I thought I didn’t need that…
Do you hear the drives spin?
How are they powered?
I suppose that your Terramaster has a backplane and does not provide 3.3V on pin 3, but better check that.
I’m assuming these were the same drives as a previous test when they were “working”.