I’ve been playing with truenas scale with the intention of upgrading from core soon. I have used a couple of old discs to set up some data sets on and get the lay of the land. But I can not get these disks back into a windows environment, I have exported deleted and wiped, but they are not seen by Diskpart or any other windows utility. I did see once one disk was inactive but I could not activate it, in diskpart or any other utility. I have formated the discs to fat32 in truenas using mkfs which appeared successful, but still not seen by anything in windows. any help appreciated, thanks Rick
Try booting up something like DBAN and using that to erase the entire disks. There may be other drive wiping software you can try
If you want to do this in windows, you can run diskpart from the command prompt as administrator. This will wipe a drive or clear partition signatures in Windows. The question comes up ever so often on how to reuse disks taken from a NAS, be it Truenas or another brand or drive array.
!!Please!! before attempting anything from the command line that is potentially destructive or a destructive program to operate on a disk, make darn sure you have the correct disk. Just because last time it was or “should be” sdc does not mean it is sdc. Once a command is issued it is too late even if you were hit ctl-c immediately.
In Windows:
I think something like open a administrator command prompt in windows then enter:
diskpart
list disk
select disk x (where x is the disk to erase from the list above)
clean (or clean all for a secure wipe.
In Linux you can use wipefs, or dd, or zpool, or others but these 2 or 3 are common. I think the last time I needed to wipe nas partition data, I used wipefs or dd but honestly don’t remember now.
I think this is the preferred method to remove partition table signatures and ZFS labels from drives.
wipefs -a /dev/sdX (where X is the drive to wipe)
Instead of wipefs you can also wipe the first 100MB of a drive usinf dd, that should be sufficient to destroy ZFS labels and any partition tables. Partition tables such as GPT, MBR and any filesystem headers like ZFS labels and md labels live at the very beginning of a disk, this effectively makes the drive “blank” so that the OS sees it as empty/uninitialized so it can be reused.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=100
Since you know it is a zfs disk, I think zfs also has a
zpool labelclear /dev/sdX command to clear zfs labels but I have never tried it.
many thanks wipefs seem to do it followed by a mkfs.fat _f 32 /Dev/SDx, one disc out of 3 showed up on windows as write protected and that was fixed by diskpart attributes, So I have my disks back thank you. Now to install truenas scale from scratch again and try not to repeat previous mistakes