Greg Clarke

How do you have the SAS drive connected to your Mint 22 box (what exact adapter/controller)? Is it going through a real SAS HBA (LSI/Broadcom-style, IT/HBA mode), or through a RAID controller / USB-SAS bridge / “virtual” adapter?

Reason I’m asking: there are basically two connection paths:

• True HBA/passthrough: Linux gets direct SCSI access (you’ll see a /dev/sgX for the disk) and you can usually low-level reformat it back to 512-byte logical blocks (e.g., from 520/528).
• RAID/USB/translation layer: the controller hides or emulates the SCSI commands, so tools like sg_format often can’t issue the low-level format needed to switch the sector size. That might be why the disk is visible in the disks app but not in gparted.

Given the screen shots I believe it’s the later. Can someone smarter than me confirm?

USB enclosures for SAS drives are available

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.