[PLUG] Raving mad RAID

[Ben Koenig]

On 2/2/21 12:09 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Feb 2021 23:48:03 -0800
> Ben Koenig <techkoenig at gmail.com> dijo:
>
>> A simple test to help everyone here understand what your machine is
>> doing would be to run through a few reboots and grab the list of
>> devices, like so
>>
>> 1) unplug your TB-3 drives and reboot.
>>
>> 2) record the output of 'ls -l /dev/nvme*' here
>>
>> 3) turn the computer off
>>
>> 4) plug in the TB-3 drives
>>
>> 5) turn the computer on and run 'ls /dev/nvme*' again.
>>
>> This will clearly isolate the device nodes for your enclosure
>> independently of everything else on your computer. Once we have the
>> drives isolate, it's trivial to watch them for irregular behavior.
>> Until we have more confidence in the existence of your /dev/nvme nodes
>> we can ignore the other symptoms.
> Here are the results:
>
> 1: (after unplugging TB3 device and rebooting)
> crw------- 1 root root 239, 0 Feb  2 12:01 /dev/nvme0
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 0 Feb  2 12:01 /dev/nvme0n1
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 1 Feb  2 12:01 /dev/nvme0n1p1
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 2 Feb  2 12:01 /dev/nvme0n1p2
> Note that nvme0 is a 1TB m.2 drive inside the Thinkpad that holds / and
> /home.
>
> 2: (after turning off computer, plugging in TB3 device, and booting)
> crw------- 1 root root 239, 0 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme0
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 0 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme0n1
> crw------- 1 root root 239, 1 Feb  2 11:47
> /dev/nvme1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 2 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme1n1
> crw------- 1 root root 239, 2 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme2
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 1 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme2n1
> crw------- 1 root root 239, 3 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme3
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 3 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme3n1
> crw------- 1 root root 239, 4 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme4
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 4 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme4n1
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 5 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme4n1p1
> brw-rw---- 1 root disk 259, 6 Feb  2 11:47 /dev/nvme4n1p2


OK so then everything seems to be connecting at the hardware level. Your 
TB controller is exposing 4 NVMe devices and they are identifying as 
block devices ("disks") which means that the hardware is functioning.


What stands out is that of the 4 disks only 1 of them actually has 
partitions. This strikes me as odd.


As a simple test, can you create a test folder in /mnt and see if those 
partitions on nvme4 are mountable?

$ mkdir /mnt/nvme

$ mount /dev/nvme4n1p1 /mnt/nvme


Both commands should be run as root and I'm assuming you have nothing 
mounted in /mnt. If that succeeds and you can view files let me know. 
Also post any output from the mount command here.

-Ben