I have some drives of various sizes, 1TB, 2TB etc. I am currently working with a 2 TB drive. I place it in a powered external USB-3 drive enclosure. I can see it in lsblk as the correct size (as SDA) , but the disk manager does not see /dev/sda, and fdisk only wants to let me create a 5 GB partition.
If I dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=400K status=progress writes 5 GB and claims my 2 TB drive (In this case) is full.
Is there a way to reclaim this drive? Any information on the drive is unimportant.
Why do you say “drive(s)”? Is this or similar happening with more than one drive?
If the other drives are working fine, then you might already have your answer. If they’re not, it sounds like the enclosure.
If you think it’s drive, try putting it in the freezer for an hour to see if anything changes. It wouldn’t be a permanent fix but, if the problem temporarily goes away, it’ll make clear that the problem is the drive, possibly due to add solder joints.
Some drives work fine. Some fail. Some work fine then fail later. But it seems hitting them with gparted to create a single ext4 partition works, brining a 5gb drive back from that state and allowing writes if I write to the partition. If I try to zero the raw device it still fails at 5gb.
Drive(s) because I have a 2tb drive (I am currently working with) and several 1tb drives and many smaller ones.
Have you tried it with a different enclosure or directly connected to your PC? My last two “faulty” HDDs actually just had a faulty controller in the enclosure. Drives were fine.
This enclosure was working up till when I stopped a dd to try something faster.
Try in another computer if you have one. The fact dd is limiting you to 5GB though doesn’t sound good, not going to lie.
I do not have another available, nor do I have an internal SATA slot available.
Here is a related question - when I was writing random or zeros to the raw device (/dev/sda) I was getting speeds of 1.7 or so mb / s now I am getting 25 mb/s writing to a file in the partition.
Why the difference?
