Did I just brick my SAS drive?
I was trying to make a pool with the other 5 drives and this one kept giving errors. As a completer beginner I turned to gpt…
What can I do? Is that drive bricked for good?
Don’t clown on me, I understand my mistake in running shell scripts from Ai…
EMPTY DRIVES NO DATA
The initial error was:

Edit: sde and SDA are the same drive, name just changed for some reason And also I know it was 100% my fault and preventable 😞
**Edit: ** from LM22, output of sudo sg_format -vv /dev/sda
BIG EDIT:
For people that can help (btw, thx a lot), some more relevant info:
Exact drive model: SEAGATE ST4000NM0023 XMGG
HBA model and firmware: lspci | grep -i raid 00:17.0 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation SATA Controller [RAID mode] Its an LSI card Bought it here
Kernel version / distro: I was using Truenas when I formatted it. Now trouble shooting on other PC got (6.8.0-38-generic), Linux Mint 22
Whether the controller supports DIF/DIX (T10 PI): output of lspci -vv
Whether other identical drives still work in the same slot/cable: yes all the other 5 drives worked when i set up a RAIDZ2 and a couple of them are exact same model of HDD
COMMANDS This is what I got for each command: verbatim output from
Thanks for all the help 😁



Can you blame them?
The manuals are written by experts for experts and in most cases entirely useless for complete beginners who likely won’t be able to even find the right manual page (or even the right manual to begin with).
Tutoral pages are overwhelmingly AI vomit too, but AI vomit from last year’s AI, so even worse than asking AI right now.
Asking for help online just gets you a “lol, RTFM, noob!”
Look at this thread right now and count how many snarky bullshit answers are there that don’t even try to answer the question, how many answers like “I got no idea” are there and then how many actually helpful answers are here.
Can you really blame anyone who turns to AI, because that garbage at least sounds like it tries to help you?
Of course we can blame them. There’s a ton of great help available, but perhaps they’re like you, and their ego is so fragile that they can’t be troubled to scroll past a few trolls to find the perfect answers.
But I think we’re all used to dealing with trolls. Everyone knows how to ignore the trolls. I think the bigger problem is that people are afraid to show ignorance, even if they definitely are ignorant, like OP was here. Imagine that, you don’t want to look foolish on the internet in front of people who don’t know who you are and never will, so you turn to a solution that doesn’t work and actually has the potential to ruin the hardware you bought… So yeah, that’s strange, that’s not rational, we can give psychological explanations, but none of them make the person in question appear reasonable.
Yes. LLMs don’t make anyone not responsible for their output.
If your dumb friend gave you bad advice and you followed it, you are ultimately still responsible for your decisions.
What’s your point? “Don’t use Linux unless you are a professional user”?
Beginners have to begin somewhere and they need to get info from somewhere.
A lot of Linux UX is still at the level where it doesn’t give enough relevant information to a non-technical user in a way that the user can actually make an informed decision. That is the core problem.
Whether users get their wrong information from AI, Stackoverflow, random tutorials, Google, a friend or somewhere else hardly matters.
Take for example a look at the setup process of a Synology NAS. A 10yo can successfully navigate that process, because it’s so well done. We need more of that, especially for FOSS stuff.
Too much of Linux is built by engineers for engineers.
A comfortable lie is still a lie. Everything that comes out of an LLM is a lie until proven otherwise. (“Lie” is a bit misleading, though, as they don’t have agency or intent: they’re a variation of your phone keyboard’s next-word text prediction algorithm. With added flattery and confidence.)
There’s a reason experienced people stress hard to others about not using them as shortcuts to your own knowledge. This is the outcome.
Another way to look at it is “trust, but verify”. If you’re intent on relying on probabilistic text as an answer, instead of bothering to learn, then take what it’s given you and verify what that does before doing it. You could learn to be an effective sloperator with just that common sense.
But if you’re going to give an LLM root/admin access to a production environment, then expect to be laughed at, because you had plenty of opportunities to not destroy something and actively chose not to use them.
Everything that comes off of a tutorial, or web page is paddling the same boat, without exception.
Are you really comparing LLM output to be on the same level of… hallucination-ness, than a Gamefaqs tutorial for a SNES game from the late 90s?
I know tiktok has deep-fried and rotten the brains of entire generations but this is just ridiculous.
Well, I can’t speak to Gamefaqs or SNES as I am incapable of gaming. However, even what I would consider reputable tutorials such as ones you find on HowToForge, sometimes don’t quite turn out as expected. There is always some config or app that the tutorial needed, but was left out by the person writing the tutorial. Or the writer of the tut, had something pre-configed or preinstalled, so it wasn’t mentioned, even when following the tutorial line by line. It’s inevitable. For this reason, I maintain a small test VPS where I can run amuck and if I fuck something up, no problem, wipe/reinstall. So, if you’re going to say don’t trust AI, then you have to also be skeptical of all tuts. I mean, that’s where the AI scrapers got the info in the first place. I’m not saying AI is 100% tho I anticipate one day it will be, or at least very damn close. There are things AI gets right. It seems very capable of writing compose files well. Just my 2p
Yes, because that’s a natural process. Most tutorial s written by users cover the experience the user had in their own use case. They don’t / can’t cover the same ground or have access to the same levels of examination that the devs can have.
Oh please. Stop licking corporate AI boot and drinking the kool-aid. There’s at least two orders of magnitude of truthfulness and trustability between “a discrete set of tutorials written to cover described use cases” and “a random mix and blend hodgepodge coke snort prisoner soup ectoplasm of all the above, fine-tuned to invent answers that produce gratification and brand dependence”. You saying that these two things are as trustable as each other suggests you have quite a misanthropic edge to your personality and/or are going through a stage of cult-of-personality (or cult-of-brand).
I trust the humans who write the tutorials that have em-dashes. I don’t trust an AI that just slurped and pirated the work of those humans to try and snake-oil me with a bunch of grammar mistakes adorned with em-dashes.
Why must you think that because I use AI that I have somehow ‘drank the kool-aid’ and am ‘licking corporate boots’? Why is that always the go to with you guys? It’s like blood in the water. Look, I am willing to accept that you vociferously dislike/hate/abhor AI. You have a definite opinion about AI. Got it loud and clear. Much like I have a definite opinion about the ‘arr stack’ which I would say that 75% of selfhosters run. You don’t hear me out here beating my tin pan every time someone mentions the arr stack tho. Why? Because I figure you are an autonomous adult capable of making your own choices, and I leave it at that. No long diatribes about copyright or theft. None of that. I let you be you, and make your own decisions…without all the browbeating.
As I have stated before, I too am fully aware, and fully autonomous. OP used AI, didn’t write down anything, lots of mistakes were made. It’s not like none of us haven’t pulled some stupid boners in our self hosting journey either. You live and learn. It does zero good tho, to brow beat OP because they made some mistakes or used AI. In fact, I would say it would drive people to use AI because of the negative reactions in this very thread.
Your unsubstantiated and unqualified psychoanalysis is way off. Maybe you’re using the wrong AI.
I had a problem with Fedora 42, where the performance of my games would be fine one day and abysmal another day. Couldn’t find a pattern. I googled a ton, tried to debug myself, asked on reddit, stackexchange, the fedora forum and lemmy. I only got answers like “Works fine on my machine, noob” and “I have that problem too”. It only affected games running in proton on heroic, everything else was fine.
After about a year of on-and-off debugging and asking around, I swallowed my pride and asked ChatGPT.
First answer from that thing was correct: I had run
dnf updatewithout doing aflatpak updateright afterwards. Turns out, flatpak has its own copy of Nvidia drivers and if the system driver is updated without the flatpak copy being updated, it falls back to software rendering. So the performance was crap until I didflatpak updatethe next time, and broke again when I randnf update.I still haven’t found that in any documentation so far.
AI is crap more often than not, but it does at least try to help and sometimes it actually does.
Look in this thread here. Is there even a single answer that tries to help OP, or is every single answer here just dumb snark?
I love how you ignore all the comments that actually tried to help OP. Or maybe you posted early on but you can’t be bothered to go back and edit your response. And then you pretend that AI tries to help us do anything, as if it had motivation or volition. Come on now.
It’s true that people on the internet can be dicks. Even more so technical people (and that’s not limited to online: those online dicks are usually IRL dicks when taking technical stuff). But that’s a hurdle, not a barrier.
There’s little anyone here can do to help OP, as they (if I understand it correctly) have already irreparably nuked their hardware. The current problem is significantly different and harder than the original problem. Asking randos on this community is unlikely to yield results. Hence the focus on variations of “Now… what did we learn? 🤨”
I’m not trying to help, as I’m not familiar enough with SAS nor the current problem. The same is likely true of others here.
The only evidence that OP irreparably nuked their hardware is ChatGPTs word.
The bigger issue ad hand is that everyone here is a noob when it comes to exotic hardware like SAS, and still everyone here thinks they are 1337 haxors enough to tell OP that they are a noob idiot.
Tbh, if OP asks for help here and there’s 49 comments of people being dicks and one that actually helps it might be worthwhile. But as it stands it’s 50 to 0, with nobody here beeing educated enough to know anything about the subject.
You can ask knowledgeable people for help instead of an ai tho
I’m torn in how to feel about this. it was stupid to turn to a chatbot for things you know nothing about, as you then can’t even verify anything. and when you are a beginner, you probably shouldn’t start with SAS hardware either because it’s more complicated with the added enterprise features.
I mean look at OPs horrible post screenshots and one rotated 90 degrees. Come on they put in little effort don’t expect lots of effort back.
Did it occur to you that OP might be a total beginner who doesn’t know about the conventions on how to report issues and how to format posts?
This is a thing that honestly still makes me seethe sometimes, because as much as the manuals are there and people should be told to read the manual before anything else, there is a vast difference between a user’s manual and a technical manual. People who answer basic questions by telling the user to RTFManpage instead of leading them to the bropage or the tl;drpage or a simple use case tutorial (or even better, providing the example themselves) ironically builds bad cred for a movement for well-documented software.
The User’s Manual for a car covers, at best, how to turn the ignition on, how to drive, how to brake in difficult conditions and how to change the tires. Maybe it covers where exactly the friggin’ cupholder is. A Technical Manual for a car is for when there’s a real exceptional emergency that’s not simply covered by user service. The computer does not work and someone (not you, but the technician!) needs to know how to pin the RS232 connectors for the emergency interface of the onboard chip. The refrigeration liquid tube has broken off and you need to know what model or measurements the replacement needs to be and what heat can it withstand before it starts melting and likely obstructing the valve. You need to know if (or for how long) the car’s engine can withstand frontal semiautomatic fire and up to what reverse speed can the vehicle perform a safe J-turn maneuver in case you face an ambush.
~95% of manpages I’ve ever seen are Technical Manuals. ~70% of “help” for non-browser systems, as well.
What beginners need to be directed at before anything else is the User’s Manual.
And if that one is not available, go get writing it.
</rant>
All that said, none of that excuses turning to AI. AI is explicitly and specifically for when you don’t want things to work, or for when you are specifically looking for someone to bullshit you. They are for evading responsibility, not for finding solutions.
I totally agree with the rant, and a big issue is that the Linux community specifically consists to a large part of technicians and not users who then go full *surprised pikachu face* when they see a user who is not a technician.
But seriosly, how would a (to quote OP) “total beginner” know that AI is not a good place to look for help?
And, tbh, it sometimes does actually help. AI lies more often than it doesn’t, but it at least tries to help, which is more than I can say of most members of the Linux community.
I had an issue on Fedora 42 where the performance of my games would randomly be abysmal. One day I can play current AAA titles without issue on my Nvidia 4070, the next day I have to measure performance in “Seconds per Frame” even on 15yo indie titles. This issue only affects game started from Heroic, all other things I try including all debugging stuff works fine.
I’m not a new Linux user. I’m a developer and I’ve been using Linux for about 20 years. So I get to debugging, googling, reading bug reports, all that, and can’t find anything. I ask on StackExchange, Lemmy, even Reddit, no result. Most people are like “Works on my machine, noob”, and a handful people are like "I have the same issue and no solution.
So after a year or so I swallow my pride and ask ChatGPT. The first answer is correct: Heroic (and thus all proton/wine games it spawns) runs in Flatpak. Flatpak has its own version of the Nvidia drivers, and if that version doesn’t exactly match the OS driver version it falls back to software rendering. So if I do
dnf updateand it updates the Nvidia drivers this breaks my performance until I doflatpak update. I often ranflatpak updatebeforednf updateand thus my performance sucked.Yes, the majority of the answers I get from AI are lies. But without AI I would still not be able to game on my system.
AI is a tool, and for beginners its a tricky tool, because sometimes it works perfectly, but sometimes it totally messes everything up. The same holds true for pretty much any other source of information made for beginners. Before “Don’t paste AI commands into CLI” we had “Don’t paste stuff from Stackoverflow into CLI” and before that it was “Don’t paste stuff you found on Google into CLI”.
Oh this so very much. We’ve ALL made horrific mistakes, most of which don’t get published on a forum for fear of the snark. It really irks me. But, there’s not much I can do about people’s attitudes. All of us were clueless, newbs, at one time or another, unless you were born with a computing device in your hand, in which case, I feel sorry for your mum.
You’re getting hate but you’re right. Friendliness in tech forums is nearly nonexistent.
Kinda as evidenced by a lot of the other responses. Thanks for the affirmation!
Depends heavily on what place you ask for help in. There are plenty of spaces explicitly meant for community tech support. In OPs case, I’ll say the title doesn’t help and asking an LLM for advice on a topic you’re unfamiliar with (and not second-guessing the commands you paste into the terminal) is such a bad idea that it really can’t be understated. I regularly catch some of my colleagues making AI-assisted mistakes and they’re professionals who genuinely know better. This shit shouldn’t ever be recommended as a learning tool for beginners without some kind of supervision or guard rails to ensure you’re not being gaslit.