June 5, 2025

Fedora 41 -- New 8G disk and general cleanup

For one reason or the other, this is turning into a much bigger adventure than I expected.

It started with my secondary hard drive starting to give me errors. When I would reboot, I would get dropped into emergency mode, I would have to run fsck and answer yes to lots of things. I could search on "ata" in /var/log/messages and see unpleasant things relating to this disk.

The disk is a 4T Western Digital WD4000 (Model WDC WD4000FYYZ-0) with a date code of 2014. I bought it as a refurbished unit and it has ran for years up to now. It has a more recently purchased brother, also with a 2014 date code that is currently working just fine

The plan is to replace the ailing 4T drive with a new 8T drive, which I purchased on Amazon for $199 (another 4T would cost $130, so for an extra $60 I get twice the space and a new drive. In fact the new drive is labeled "8TB Gaming Hard Drive" WD8002FZBX, 15 Jan 2025. It has a 256M cache (the old 4T had a 64M cache).

So I open up my case, swap the drive in, and the system won't boot. This is not what I expected. So here are more details about my system. I run Fedora 41 (Fedora 42 is out and on my list to upgrade to soon, but one thing at a time). My disk layout is: 

sda - on Z77 sata cable 0 -- 1T SSD (samsung 870)
sdb - on Z77 sata cable 1 -- 128G SSD (samsung 850)
DVD - on Z77 sata cable 2
sdc - on Marvel sata cable 0 -- the bad 4T drive
sdd - on Marvel sata cable 1 -- the good 4T drive
So, you would think the system would just boot from sda. And it should.

Restarting the system and typing DEL to get into the BIOS shows me only some WD4000 drive and the DVD as boot options. That is strange.

The motherboard is a Gigabyte G1 Sniper 3. The Manual is dated 2012. It is an Intel Z77 chipset board and supports the LGA1155 socket.

It has 10 sata connectors. Two are 6G capable on the Z77 chipset. Four are 3G capable on the Z77 chipset, and 4 are 6G capable on the Marvell chipset.

As you can see from my list above, I put both SSD onto the 6G Z77 connectors, and both spinning drives on the 6G marvell connectors. Only the DVD drive (which I never use give that I can boot from USB sticks to do installs) is on the 3G Z77 connectors.

An mSATA connector

Amazingly, this motherboard has an mSata connector. This is not m.2 compatible. Off on a tangent here. These drives are available, but I have yet to find one bigger that 256G by a major player. However, I will note that my current 1T drive is only 7 percent full, so a 256G would be perhaps 28 percent full and would be just fine.

When this is used, it takes the place of the last (number 5) SATA cable connector on the Z77.

Apparently these were most commonly used in laptops, but these days modern motherboards go with M.2. I can get a 256G Kingston on Transcend unit for $36.

Get rid of that old 128G SSD drive

It has the root for an old (circa 2023) Fedora 38 install on it. I was only relevant for a short time when I wanted to pull files off of it to my new install of 39 on my 1T SSD. 
su
cd /oldroot
tar cvf /u1/oldroot.tar .
I also have "oldhome" mounted, but it is only links to /u1/home/fred and such. I edit my fstab so these will no longer be mounted.

I want to use the 128G drive to experiment with, not to mention just get it out of my system and generally tidy up.

Download Fedora 42 XFCE spin

This will be useful to have (perhaps) on a bootable USB stick, and I would like to install it onto that 128G SSD drive and see if I can learn some things. This went very fast and gives me a 2.3G ISO image, so I should easily fit on the 8G USB stick I just dug out of my drawer. 
dd if=Fedora-Xfce-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdd bs=32M
The copy to the USB stick is what takes a long time.

Boot without the 128G "sdb"

I remove this drive, and edit fstab so it won't be mounted. I start the system and use DEL to get to the bios. This is amazing. The BIOS boot menu now shows the Samsung 1T drive as the default boot device. Apparently somehow the presence of that 128G drive was hiding the 1T drive (or something). At any rate, this is what I wanted and was hoping for.

I go ahead and boot into linux. Linux now calls what was sdc to be sdb, so it drops me into emergency mode. I make that change to the fstab and it boots up.

Try booting with only the SSD

I have to do this to be sure there isn't some odd dependency on my 4T disk. It works fine. Of course I have to login as root, since the home directory for tom is on /u1

Remove the old /u2 drive and try the 8G again

This is the bottom drive in my case. And it is the one I bought just a few months ago (I wrote the date on the drive). So these "refurb" drives are not all they might be. I have done well with some, but not this one. It cost me $65, so it isn't worth any bother to pursue a refund. (It was an Amazon renewed item with 90 day replacement -- purchased in 9/2024). It is still working, albeit with bad sectors suggesting failure is around the corner. I can put it on the shelf as an "archival backup".

The new 8G "black" has a 5 year warranty, but I have no idea what you need to do if a drive actually fails. The warranty is more of a sign that the drive won't fail. But .... It seems to have arrived DOA.

I have tried it on the normal spot (Marvel port 1) and also where the old 128G SSD used to be (Z77 port 1) neither work. The BIOS sees it, but reports the size as 0G. Linux also sees it, but: 

Jun  5 14:52:03 trona kernel: ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xf7636000 port 0xf7636180 irq 27 lpm-pol 3
Jun  5 14:52:03 trona kernel: ata2: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
Jun  5 14:52:03 trona kernel: ata2.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
Jun  5 14:52:03 trona kernel: ata2: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
Jun  5 14:52:03 trona kernel: ata2.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
Jun  5 14:52:03 trona kernel: ata2: limiting SATA link speed to 3.0 Gbps
Jun  5 14:52:03 trona kernel: ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 320)
Jun  5 14:52:03 trona kernel: ata2.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
Jun  5 14:52:03 trona kernel: ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 320)
So the drive is failing to respond to efforts to ask it who it is and what capacity, or something of the sort. The end result is that no devie for it appears in /dev, which is all I care about. Having tried it on two different ports using different cables (that work with other drives), I can only conclude that it needs to be returned to Amazon.

And on the topic of Amazon. I was shocked and appalled to see the drive sitting on my doorstep without any packaging other than the retail box with a label slapped on. Now for many items this would be a good idea, but precision optics (binoculars and such), and especially something like a hard drive, which everyone knows are ruined by rough handling, it is insane.

Pick out another 8G drive

Given that Amazon doesn't know a hard drive from a brick, we will buy the next one from NewEgg, or even BH photo.

And some searching on WD black leads me to understand there are better options for what I want to do. I am more interested in a drive designed for a datacenter than one designed to gaming.

BH sells the Ultrastar HC320 (an 8G 7200 rpm drive with 256M of cache) for $237.50 with free shipping. I placed the order! It is now Tuesday and they say I should see it next Tuesday. I have already returned the Black, dropping it off at the UPS store just an hour ago.

WD has its "Gold" and "Ultrastar" drives for datacenter purposes. I read that the Gold is now using technology from the Ultrastar, so they are hardly different. The Ultrastar series came to be when WD acquired HGST. HGST was working with technology they got from IBM. The HGST drives had a better reliability than Seagate.

You could go with Seagate. They have an Exos series aimed at datacenter use. For the record, NewEgg sells the 7E10 Exos (8G, 256M cache, 7200 rpms) for $205.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org