OP here... We're good now. It turns out that not even option 4/4a will wipe these drives. I replaced them with six blank drives from the cabinet and I've marked the troublemakers "DOT 8.1 only". I have another filer I can use them with.

This reminds me of the time I connected some old SATA drives from an HP MSA2000 to new box and couldn't boot the ESXi installation ISO until I moved all the drives over to a Windows box and cleaned them with DISKPART. The installer would see the foreign partition and freeze.

Thanks for all your help,

From: Ian.Thompson2@phoenix.co.uk
To: rm@richardmay.net; toasters@teaparty.net
Subject: RE: DOT 8.1 disk in a DOT 7.3 filer
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 11:07:30 +0000

I’ve had this before, spent ages messing with it then I dropped the discs into a spare chassis running 7.3 and ran a full system wipe on it and all was well iirc.

Obviously only useful info if you have a spare head…. FAS250/270 is perfect for the job if you’re talking DS14 discs….

From: toasters-bounces@teaparty.net [mailto:toasters-bounces@teaparty.net] On Behalf Of R M
Sent: 27 March 2014 10:51
To: toasters@teaparty.net
Subject: DOT 8.1 disk in a DOT 7.3 filer

Gents,

My Google-fu is exhausted. I am trying to use disks from an 8.1.3 system in a 7.3.7 filer. I am aware of the disk label problem and I have tried the half-dozen step process (documented in several places) for re-labeling the drives. I'm not able to wipe the label from the drives due to the following:

*> label wipe 0a.17

Error: label wipe not permitted as the disk has a bad RAID version.

*>label makespare 0a.17

*********************************************************

Label editing is highly dangerous and should be attempted

ONLY by NetApp Customer Support Engineers.

Misuse can cause ALL data to be permanently lost.

*********************************************************

'Label save': Error while trying to save Label 1 on disk 0a.17: error 15.

I get this in both diag mode and when booted into maintenance mode. Any ideas?