[SOLVED] NVME Drive Disappeared from Host After Thinpool Creation

[dullpointer]

I'm learning by doing, so apologies if I've missed some basic steps or information. I have a three node cluster made up of Lenovo ThinkCentres (M900 TFF) that I got from a friend after his work decommissioned them. They've been working great, but only came with 128GB SSD SATA drives, which leaves me with limited storage. I had a spare 500GB NVME SDD that had been functioning as the main drive on a separate machine that I was no longer using, so I pulled it, and put it in one of the hosts. It showed up just fine as nvme0n1. I used PVE GUI to Wipe Disk, and it returned status OK.

found child partitions to wipe: /dev/nvme0n1p3, /dev/nvme0n1p1, /dev/nvme0n1p4, /dev/nvme0n1p2
wiping block device /dev/nvme0n1
/dev/nvme0n1p3: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0x00000003 (ntfs): 4e 54 46 53 20 20 20 20
/dev/nvme0n1p1: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0x00000052 (vfat): 46 41 54 33 32 20 20 20
/dev/nvme0n1p1: 1 byte was erased at offset 0x00000000 (vfat): eb
/dev/nvme0n1p1: 2 bytes were erased at offset 0x000001fe (vfat): 55 aa
/dev/nvme0n1p4: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0x00000003 (ntfs): 4e 54 46 53 20 20 20 20
/dev/nvme0n1: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0x00000200 (gpt): 45 46 49 20 50 41 52 54
/dev/nvme0n1: 8 bytes were erased at offset 0x773c255e00 (gpt): 45 46 49 20 50 41 52 54
/dev/nvme0n1: 2 bytes were erased at offset 0x000001fe (PMBR): 55 aa
/dev/nvme0n1: calling ioctl to re-read partition table: Success
200+0 records in
200+0 records out
209715200 bytes (210 MB, 200 MiB) copied, 0.857174 s, 245 MB/s
TASK OK

i then initialized with GPT, and it returned status OK.

Creating new GPT entries in memory.
The operation has completed successfully.
TASK OK

I then initiated creation of LVM-Thin Storage NVME Thinpool. This also returned status OK.

  Physical volume "/dev/nvme0n1" successfully created.
  Volume group "NvmeThinpool" successfully created
  Rounding up size to full physical extent <467.28 GiB
  Rounding up size to full physical extent <4.77 GiB
  Thin pool volume with chunk size 64.00 KiB can address at most <15.88 TiB of data.
  Logical volume "NvmeThinpool" created.
TASK OK

However after this was completed, neither the Thinpool nor the drive show up as options any longer in the GUI. The drive is not listed in /dev/ under sdb or nvme0n1. It is not returned by fdisk -l, lsblk, df -h, or parted. I'm accessing the host through the GUI and ssh, so I haven't been able to actually check if the drive is showing up in BIOS, and I haven't tried physically removing and re-seating the drive yet, but I don't know what caused this, so I'm not sure how to avoid it in the future. This drive appeared completely functional, and was running as the main drive on a Windows machine without issues for a few years. I think I vaguely recall reading a thread on Stack Exchange, or Reddit a while back about some issues with Lenovos bricking some hardware or the whole machine when adding/replacing certain hardware, so I'm not sure if this is perhaps some sort of hardware security issue, but it would seem pretty odd not to allow additional storage even if it's formatted differently than expected, and it seemed to be perfectly functional prior to these operations. Maybe I missed something, and messed up the process since this is the first time I'm trying to add an internal drive to a PVE host that is separate from the OS drive, but I've added external USB drives before, so I'm scratching my head as to what is going on here. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[dullpointer]

I managed to fix this, though I'm not exactly sure why or how it was resolved. I had rebooted the node probably half a dozen times without any effect. I ran systemctl restart pve-cluster.service on this node, then both of the other ones because I know the whole cluster can behave oddly when things are out of sync, but this didn't seem to have any impact, either. I finally hooked a monitor and keyboard up to the node, and booted into BIOS, and sure enough, it listed the drive just like it should. Without changing any settings in the BIOS utility, i rebooted the machine. Once the node booted back to the CLI, the NVME drive and thinpool were listed in both the CLI and GUI as if it had been there the whole time. Mocking me. Laughing in my face. Calling me mad. Oh well, off to tilt at windmills now, I suppose. Closing this ticket.