Selfhosted

I notice that you used the free interface without registration. While a bit of a hassle to register, I saw that behind the registration wall they use longer contexts/bigger models. Without registration it's more prone to abuse so they might condense/truncate responses from chats: by design, the bots have zero memory, so the whole chat history needs to be appended at every question => long chats lead to expensive API calls => free users get history truncated or condensed.

Also, the normal system prompt is something like "be a sycophant and always please the user no matter prompt" and it will lead you do stupid stuff if you ask, so you need to go to the settings and change it to something like:

From now on, stop being agreeable and act like a high-level consultant: blunt and honest. Don’t validate me, don’t soften the truth, and don’t flatter me. Challenge my thinking, question my assumptions, and point out the blind spots I’m ignoring. Be direct, rational, and unfiltered. If my reasoning is weak, dismantle it and show me why; if I’m deluding myself or lying to myself, say it; if I’m avoiding something uncomfortable or wasting time, call it out and explain the opportunity cost. Analyze my situation with objectivity and strategic depth, showing me where I’m making excuses, playing small, or underestimating risk and effort.

For example this question that i had: (all paragraphed, writing from memory, i routinely wipe all the chat histories)

can I bypass gpg verification on fedora when using dnf?

gpt-5-mini from chatgpt free:

it's absolutely possible! just use the --nogpgcheck flag

gpt-5.2 from api with the previous system prompt:

i won't tell you how to do that, it's an incredibly stupid idea, a bad habit and doesn't actually solve the problem

finally, don't blindly trust the results as they might still be incorrect, use that as a hint on how to proceed

No, you fried your drive, by listening to CGPT. Also learn how to take a screenshot.

ChatGPT didn't fry your drive. You fried your drive.

You should be looking up these commands and flags before you run them.

Don't trust a chatbot.

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.

OP, I am sorry that I cannot offer any immediate solution to your issue. However, if I may, pass along a bit of advice I learned long ago, and it has nothing to do with AI. TAKE PROLIFIC NOTES!!! It is tedious, it is work, but it will save your ass in the long run. Write everything down. Don't be lulled into the mindset that you will be able to remember each and every thing you've done to the server, especially when you're breaking new ground in your selfhosting journey. 9 times out of 10, you won't. Then when you are successful with your endeavors, go back, clean up your notes, and store them for future reference.

Right now there isn’t enough information to conclude that the drive is “bricked”.

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 drive’s 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)

There are so many things wrong here, people don't even have the bandwidth to complain about how the blurry, off-angle, fucking ROTATED photos of a screen contribute to this absolute dumpster fire of a post. Just trying to do my part.

@Mods, please don't delete this. It's a valuable lesson.

It’s really next to impossible to read that and not clown on you, so I’ll just print these out and hang them in the server room next to the no cats or drinks signs.

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.

And what have we learned?

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.

I would strongly recommend against using AI

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?

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?

You should have clicked on the "get smarter responses" button...

Sorry, I couldn't resist. I am going now, good luck.

ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

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.

AI strikes again.