CLearing the remnants of a a filesystem can be awkward. In order to
clear previously used partitions for clean OS installation, I used to
use lvm (to get a list of known volumes and devices, activate them
enough to write to, an dthem delete them *all* with extreme
prejudice).

Then i'd use parted to partition, as desired, and then mkfs to set up
partitions. Doing this as a well scripted '%pre' operation can save
enormous complexity in trying to trick the very limited and
underdocumented 'anaconda' tools into doing the wreite things.
Unfortunately, the parted that came with CentOS 5 installation media
was not as powerful as that which came with the operating system, so
some extra chicanery was sometimes required.



On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 12:32 AM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 01/28/2015 07:21 PM, Brandon Vincent wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 6:08 PM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Any advice would be appreciated.
>>
>> Clonezilla Live does support USB 3.0.
>>
>> Out of curiosity, is the external drive you connected formatted as
>> FAT32? The 4 GB file size limit would explain why dd would be failing.
>>
>> Brandon Vincent
>
> The target hard drive is supposed to have no file system format (just the
> low level format from the manufacturer) -- not MS Windows, Mac OS X, or any
> other file system format.  It is supposed to be "brand new raw".
>
> Will gparted work to remove any high level format?  It should -- the drive
> can be accessed as /dev/sdj (over the USB 3 interface to the external disk
> holding unit).
>
> Yasha Karant