The original post: /r/homelab by /u/jacquest18 on 2024-10-11 21:52:54.

Pretext: All data is backed up and safe. My server is running Ubuntu 22.04

So I recently bought an 8TB drive for my Jellyfin server. The other seven disks in the array are 4TB, but this new 8TB is part of a plan to slowly upgrade all of my drives to 8TB. I know that mdadm will only partition the new drive as a 4TB; this isn’t the issue.

After I added the drive to the array via Webmin (no aversion to terminal, just convenient), I let it do its thing and sync back up. After that, I needed to apply a system update so I rebooted, but rebooted into emergency mode

I had determined it was an issue with the array (because it was the only change) so I took the array out of fstab and rebooted, this time actually getting into the OS. Trying to mount the array would result in can't read superblock on /dev/md0.

I was able to force it to assemble and mount, and immediately backed it all up to externals. Doing some poking around, mdadm seems to think that a disk in the array has failed (there are no failed disks), and it keeps pointing toward the new 8TB drive being the issue. At this point, I’m over trying to fix the array, and want to just delete it and make the array from new

Here’s the issue though: I’ve tried everything I can think of. zero-superblock on every device in the array individually, wipefs -a on every disk, deleting the records of any array in mdadm.conf, I even used dd to zero out every drive (granted, I only had count=1). The array refuses to die. Every time I create the array from new, I get “clean, degraded, recovering,” and mounting the array results in my files being there exactly how I left them. The “degraded” is interesting, because while it says “1 disks have failed,” all 8 are detected and clean. I ran SMART tests on them all just to be safe, and they all passed.

Is the array being stored somewhere else that I haven’t checked yet? I just want to completely nuke the array so I can create from new and start over.