Have I trashed my HDDs and SATA controllers?

[Draeconis]

Hi chaps,

I recently got my FreeNAS box up and running properly, and copied over my data. Tested it out, and it seemed fine, so I decided it was as good a time as any to remove MacZFS and install OpenZFS. Before re-creating the storage pool, I decided it might be a good idea for performance to zero these drives out. I wrote a command to zero each drive out sequentially, which was ticking along just fine, at around 250MB/s. After kicking this off, I worked out it'd roughly take 12 hours to do this, and I'd prefer waking up this morning with it all done, as I'm not back at mine until Tuesday, and don't really want my machine on doing nothing for nearly a week. So I cancelled the previous command, and instead opened 4 terminal windows and via diskutil, asked it to zero out each drive at the same time. I checked the throughput with Activity Monitor and disk writes shot up to 750-950MB/s, and left it at that.

This morning I checked on its progress.

1 drive was 80% finished. 2 were 50%, 1 was only 10%.

Since each one individually would only taken a couple of hours or so, this was a bit confusing

I checked disk writes. 5-10KB/s.

Oh.

Restarted the Mac Pro, and couldn't log in.

Restarted it again and it wouldn't finish booting.

Removed all drives, and put another drive in Bay 1. Disk Utility and System Information couldn't see a drive.

Put the original disk from Bay 1 to my eSATA adapter. The disk spun up, and OS X crashed.

It looks like I've not only managed to screw the drives up, but also the SATA-II ports on the logic board.

Anyone able to confirm if this would be expected behavior, or if that kind of thing shouldn't happen?

 

[Gav Mack]

I seriously doubt you trashed your logic board - only trashed your senses surely by reading all what you've done.

You will need a computer capable of reading MacZFS, OpenZFS and HFS+ to recover that data or a linux based recovery boot disk which can support all those formats likely via FUSE extensions. You may get more success from recovering from any non zereoed drives but I just get fragments back from wiped disks especially if it's large files like video.

A bit of a mare - as we say over here in London and good luck!

 

[Draeconis]

I live near London myself, so I'd say it's a 'mare too

I'm not concerned about recovering data off of the drives; I've got all that backed up. It's the fact I may have broken them and the ports in the logic board that's concerning me. My Mac Pro is Mid 2010, and I know what a replacement logic board costs!

 

[Gav Mack]

I live near London myself, so I'd say it's a 'mare too

I'm not concerned about recovering data off of the drives; I've got all that backed up. It's the fact I may have broken them and the ports in the logic board that's concerning me. My Mac Pro is Mid 2010, and I know what a replacement logic board costs!

Totally. Cushty with no data to recover then - get the free killdisk ISO burnt onto a CD, boot off it and zero each drive. Properly zeroed afterwards you should be able to partition them fine using Disk Utility.