ChatGPT didn't fry your drive. You fried your drive.
You should be looking up these commands and flags before you run them.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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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...
Edit: 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 π
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.
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?
Can you really blame anyone who turns to AI, because that garbage at least sounds like it tries to help you?
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.
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 update without doing a flatpak update right 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 did flatpak update the next time, and broke again when I ran dnf 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?
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? π€¨"
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.
Asking for help online just gets you a "lol, RTFM, noob!"
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.
Itβs really next to impossible to read that and not clown on you, so Iβll just print these out and hang them in the server room next to the no cats or drinks signs.
No cats?! High blasphemy! Servers are warm and the perfect bed!
@Mods, please don't delete this. It's a valuable lesson.
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.
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.
Exactly this. People here mass downvote but I personally find AI to be extremely useful... To do things I already know how to do but don't have the time for. I don't trust it to do things I can't spot the errors in
The only useful thing I've found so good for is quickly scrubbing though shops. They are really good at looking at hundreds of urls and reviewing the content and then vomiting up the results
When looking for a laptop it was invaluable.
Those sub reddits that are basically nothing but people asking for laptop recommendations basically could just be replaced with a LLM.
AI is after all the perfect example of wisdom of the masses. Aka 80% accurate 80% of the time.
Seriously trying to find a 18 inch hdr laptop with a AMD CPU and replaceable ram that did not contain a laundry list of parts that I know have no driver support on Linux... Is a pain in the ass. Cause half the time AMD laptops arnt advertised at fucking all and sit on some random page you have to know just exists.
Even using newegg filters couldn't find the fucking laptop cause of mislabeling. But the AI found it.
Fucking thing is like a web crawler on crack.
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?
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.
I would strongly recommend against using AI
AI strikes again.
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?
Thanks for the input
I thought the SAS worked like a data, just wipe and go... I'm not sure how to get this SAS connected to another computer as it is connected to my server through a SAS card...
Any ideas?
Yeah, generally it does. Maybe just see if there's a command to turn DIF off? I've never had an issue using a SAS drive just like any other. It's certainly not anything permanent.
I have never worked with SAS drives. Another way to do what I suggested is to connect the server to a display output and boot a linux ISO with a libe environment.
Right now there isnβt enough information to conclude that the drive is βbrickedβ.
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 driveβs 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! π
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.Β
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.Β
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.
By the time you ask AI you could just read the docs
AI is so much faster than reading docs. And you get context specific responses that you can drill into. When used correctly it's very useful.
This was using it.. incorrectly though..
Im on the same boat. Especiakly claude opus 4.5 writes better scripts in 20s than i could in 2 hours of web search and debugging
For critical baremetal/live situations i will use the docs and/or use AI for debugging help only.
I support this!! π
AI is a tool like a hammer, you can hit a steel nail with it or a finger nail. It depends completely on you. Don't be fooled by its "thinking" ability..
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?
The drive got whipped and apparently you're not supposed to wipe a SAS drive like a normal SATA one ...
The drive got whipped [sic]
Oh, it was just sitting there and "got wiped"? Not because of a command you ran?
Sorry to be snarky but when asking for help you need to provide what you did, what error message you see now or what you expect to happen and what is actually happening. Also what OS you're using would be helpful.
Presumably you should be able to get the drive back into a usable state - but I'm not familiar with SAS drives.
Mb, I meant I wiped the drive...
I am using Truenas CE