I have 4 old hard drives that I pulled from an old Drobo that needs to be trashed. I bought a Mediasonic 4-bay RAID enclosure that I thought would be a good upgrade, but knew going into that the drives may not work because the manual for the new enclosure specifically says to use new drives to avoid problems. The exact product is this Mediasonic one.

I don’t care about the existing data on these drives, and that was originally what I thought was meant by “avoiding problems”. So I tried just putting the drives in to no avail. They don’t show up as drives in the file explorer. They don’t show up in “Disks”.

I also have an external hard drive dock - the 15 year old version of this one which does let me mount the drives and see them in Disks.

I have tried running “wipefs -a” and I’ve tried formatting them in Disks with no filesystem specified. I’ve also run parted on them, but anything I try in parted gives me the error “unrecognised disk label”.

If I can’t reuse these old drives then the enclosure is of less use to me than I had hoped as I don’t intend to buy new drives any time soon.

Is there anything else I can try to reset these drives to a state where they’ll act like new drives that have never been used before?

Update: The “tricks” haven’t worked so I’m doing the full disk write using dd. It’ll be a while before I have 2 disks prepped to try.

  • @Reliant1087
    1•2 days ago

    Total shot in the dark but what does testdisk say?

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•2 days ago

      I’ve never used this before so I’m not sure what to make of it. I am currently letting it analyze one of the disks and it’s seeing a lot of HFS+ blocks (I assume that’s what it’s reporting) and a handful of ext4. That makes sense I guess, since I’m not wiping the drive, just trying to delete any partition info and/or formatting.

      The only thing that seems like it might affect how the disk looks when inserted is cylinder geometry but I don’t know enough about that to even guess at what to do with it. Is there something I should be looking for in testdisk?

      • @Reliant1087
        1•1 day ago

        I was hoping that testdisk would show you something funky going on with the partition table based on the parted error. No luck I guess.

        My next two ideas are,

        1. As far as I know wipefs just tries to wipe what blkid sees and it might have screwed up something. What if we just dd the whole drive with zeros and let your enclosure take it from there?
        2. What does smartctl say? Might be worth it to run the long and short tests to make sure that the drives themselves are okay.