Selfhosted

ChatGPT didn't fry your drive. You fried your drive.

You should be looking up these commands and flags before you run them.

As a completer beginner I turned to gpt

I tell people not to do that all the time. They'd rather listen to the statistical vomit machine.

It’s really next to impossible to read that and not clown on you, so I’ll just print these out and hang them in the server room next to the no cats or drinks signs.

@Mods, please don't delete this. It's a valuable lesson.

Don't trust AI to know what they're doing for you. The only time they work reliably as a tool is when you already know what you're doing enough to spot their errors/hallucinations.

AI is the wrong tool here. You need to do real internet research.

I'm confident this is recoverable. Can you throw the failing drive into a USB enclosure? It might be easier to reformat the drive in the OS you're most familiar with.

And don't feel bad about breaking things, that's the best way to learn! I've been breaking things long before ChatGPT came along.

Per this forum post, you might just need to reboot. This was the first link that came up when I searched for your error. In the future, turn to documentation and the forums/support for the software rather than a dumb text generator.

And what have we learned?

Oh dear God, what were you thinking? Why did you turn to chatgbt knowing that you could have actually found a website that told you what to do correctly written by someone who actually did it before?

AI strikes again.

I would strongly recommend against using AI

Sorry friend.

If your data was occupationally-sensitive or renders you vulnerable to financial ruination, it's time to move to a recovery phase and see if modern data recovery specialists can work their voodoo.

Remember: never run experimental commands (you or a GenAI) in a live environment. See how it breaks things in a test environment first - if it shits itself, you may even get to learn how to fix it before running the instruction on live data.

Anecdote time! A good friend of mine drove his car to a mutual colleague's place once because the wipers were about as much use as two chicken breasts on metal poles. He says to our colleague "Hey Foxy, I hear you're good with cars, can you fix these wipers for me? The rubber seems to be in good nick but it's not clearing anything".

"Sure thing," Foxy proudly announces, "I'll get to work".

Foxy strips the wipers down, one component at a time, before dusting his hands off and walking away.

"What's going on, Foxy? The thing's still in bits!" my pal says.

"No idea," says Foxy, "not a fucking Scooby mate" and goes back inside, leaving his wipers and actuating motor in about fourteen pieces on the roadside.

So much for being good with cars.

Why do you trust a text generator for critical things? And did you really not cross check what command it is asking you to run?

Anyway, the solution...

If I were you I would plug the drive into a system where I can run gparted or KDE Partition Manager, with a GUI and try to format the drive again, create the partition table again. If you have tried that, what errors are you getting?

Right now there isn’t enough information to conclude that the drive is “bricked”.

sg_format on a SAS drive with DIF enabled can absolutely make the disk temporarily unusable to the OS if the format parameters no longer match what the HBA/driver expects, but that is very different from a dead drive.

To make any determination, more data is required. At minimum (boot with a live Linux USB drive if you are unable to get to this information):

Please provide verbatim output from:

• dmesg -T (from boot and when the drive is detected)
• sblk -o NAME,MODEL,SIZE,PHY-SeC,LOG-SeC
• fdisk -l /dev/sdX
• sg_inq /dev/sdX
• sg_readcap -l /dev/sdX
• sg_modes -a /dev/sdX

Also specify:

• Exact drive model
• HBA model and firmware
• Kernel version / distro
• Whether the controller supports DIF/DIX (T10 PI)
• Whether other identical drives still work in the same slot/cable

Common possibilities (none can be confirmed without logs):

• Drive formatted with DIF enabled but HBA/OS not configured for it
• Logical/physical block size mismatch (e.g. 520/528 vs 512/4096)
• Format still in progress or left the drive in a non-ready state
• Mode pages changed that Linux does not like by default

Things that are usually recoverable on SAS drives:

• Re-formatting with correct sector size and DIF disabled
• Clearing protection information
• Power-cycling the drive after format completion
• Formatting from a controller that fully supports the drive’s feature set

Actual permanent bricking from sg_format alone is rare unless firmware flashing or vendor-specific commands were involved.

Until logs are posted, all anyone can honestly say is:

The drive is not currently usable, but there is no evidence yet that it is permanently damaged.

If you can share this information it might be possible to get the drive back online, though I make no promises.

(edit typos)

@rook To be fair, that's an extremely zen attitude ChatGPT has - "Focus on the 5 healthy SAS drives." Therapy goals! 😏

Am I the only one who has no idea what their problem is now? Just that there was an error about DIF but... What's the issue now?

I started my self hosting journey a bit over a year ago. Now I host and maintain multiple services for me and my family. 1000% absolutely could not have set it all up without ChatGPT. Just no way. 

Thing is, I'm not a computer beginner. I'd confidently say I'm a moderately advanced computer user with a decent understanding of Linux/BSD and POSIX shell. I used ChatGPT to learn how to set things up gradually. Yes, things did break a couple of times and I spent a few late nights fixing them, but I never ran commands that I knew were irreversible until I fully understood what they did. This cautiousness comes with experience. 

So, unlike many, I do encourage the use of ChatGPT for assisting with computer related projects, just know your abilities and don't trust the robot unconditionally.