Other Cannot get GEOM tree: Illegal byte sequence

Hi.

I'm on 10.0-RELEASE, on amd64.

I have this problem with a home server I recently put together. Some of the hard drives came from some old computers and I suspect at least one of them is not feeling too good. But the machine boots and works anyway, I can access my zpools and so on.

But what I cannot do is anything involving partitioning. Whatever gpart(8) command I try to run I get the error message:
Code:
Cannot get GEOM tree: Illegal byte sequence
This means that I can't look at partition tables and can't create partitions (at least not using gpart(8)). If I try to create a new partition table I get the message:
Code:
gpart: Autofill: Illegal byte sequence
I noticed there is a bug report which seems to be about this same exact thing, but it is from a year and a half ago (PR 178684).

Does anyone know what the cause of this problem is? I'm pretty sure it's one disk which is busted somehow, but why would this prevent me from listing partitions on another disk? Is this a feature?

On a related note: is it safe to hot-plug/unplug SATA hard drives? If it is, it would make this problem much less painful to investigate further.
 
If the drives were only used for ZFS, they might have only ZFS partitioning information. Which would also mean there is no additional free space on them anyway.

SATA is technically supposed to support hot-plug, and some have reported doing it. It's not clear how this would help you.

Have you run SMART tests on the drives?
 
Hi, thanks for replying. I wasn't clear about the hard drives. There are 20 drives in this computer. A few of them have some smart errors. But I can read data from them, and everything seems to work. Eight of the drives are new and have no partition table. Six are in a raidz array, they all have one partition that covers the entire disk. Two are from an old windows system and have ntfs-systems and regular MBRs. Two are the system disks, in raid1, these have three gpt partitions each (boot, root, swap (I think, I can't run gpart show)). Two are old disks that I'm not even sure whats on them anymore (can't see the partition table).

What I'm wondering is this: First, does anybody know what that error means?
Second, and most important, is there a way for me to format the new drives? I cannot understand why the fact that one or a couple of my disks are busted would mean that I can't make partitions on my new disks. Also I can't understand why I can't show the partition table on one of the disks that are working just because there is a busted drive in the system.

Should I just give up on gpt and go with regular fdisk?

SATA hot-plugin doesn't help in itself, but it does help to shorten the debug cycle since I don't have to keep powering the machine up and down when removing/reattaching drives.
 
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