Disk space completely vanished after failed ZFS install
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Hello everyone,
I recently tried to install pfSense 2.4.5 onto a new machine and tried to manually setup partitions for a ZFS filesystem. Ultimately I failed and proceeded with the Auto (ZFS) installation which went somewhat successfully. Once on the web interface, I noticed that something was wrong about the partitions the installer created. Not only were there two ~ 9GB partitions, one \ root partition and another zroot one, but also some smaller ones of which I cannot remember the names.
Here comes the issue: The SSD I installed pfSense on (an Intel M15) only has 16GB of capacity. Well had that is. Because once I tried to reinstall pfSense on the same machine, only 13.7GB of capacity remained. The rest is just… gone. There are no partitions or anything besides the main 13.7GB unallocated space.
So in the end, after a lot of attempts in the pfSense installer and with various software on, I somewhat give up and need to ask for any advice on getting my SSD back to nominal capacity. If I had to guess, the missing space is the remnant of the encrypted pfSense install I did in the very beginning as pfSense requires around 1GB of installed space as far as I can tell. Add the much larger than usual log files I saved on there and it somewhat matches the missing capacity. However, please note that I am a total noob when it comes to BSD in general. Thanks for any ideas you might have!
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You could try t d/l a live ISO of Gparted and use that to clean the disk, or hook it to a Windows box and use the "clean" commands in diskpart.
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Are you sure it ever showed the full 16GB? Drives usually do not.
Steve
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@provels Thanks for your suggestions, but unfortunately none of them worked. I have also tried various other disk partitioning software, but all of them just see the 13.7 GiB of unallocated space.
@stephenw10 Yes, it did correctly report around 16 billion bytes of addressable capacity when I first tested the drive which is why it confuses me so much. It has actually lost some of its capacity out of nowhere. I should have written the more correct GiB notation in my original post, sorry for that.
Well anyway, thanks for your reply’s, but at this point I don’t think it’s a simple software issue but a more serious hardware or firmware issue I cannot fix. I will wait for what Intel support has to say and will update the post if anything meaningful comes out of it for anyone having a similar issue in the future.
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I would probably try low-level formatting it using the Intel SSD tool if you have Windows available.
Steve
