Konstantin Olchanski wrote on 9/23/15 7:19 PM:
> On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 03:54:18PM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>
>> Hilarity ensued. I had to explain to several engineers, for both VM's
>> and for repurposing hardware, that you should really clear the first
>> blocks of a disk before handing it off to an installer, precisely to
>> clear this and other kinds of confusion.
>>
>
> First few blocks is not good enough. I had trouble with RHEL/SL installer
> finding some old md raid signatures or superblocks or something and refusing
> to use the disk (after asking and answering all the installer question,
> injury+insult).
I ran into the same problem when building a SL6.x cluster using scrounged
old disks (academia ya know...). Several times Anaconda would pop up a
message window saying something like: "I'm terribly sorry, but this disk
has unidentified BIOS Raid Metadata and I am just not going to use it."
What the...... I don't care! This is a bare metal installation! Use the
damn disk! Which promptly fell on deaf ears.
Fortunately, I discovered that if I take said disk and plop it into another
system, I can use LVM (GUI or command line) to force the initialization of
the device. In the GUI, at the upper left, click on Tools -> Initialize
Block Device. Then enter the device name - in my case /dev/sdb.
Bingo. I can now use the disk in an installation or whatever.
> The installer must have a button for "yes, I want to use this disk, yes, I know
> it has/had some data, yes, I am know what I am doing, just use this disk already".
>
> But people who write installers have no brains. How else you explain
> multiple disks being presented as "you have 6 disks: wdc, wdc, wdc, wdc, wdc and wdc,
> you *must* chose the right one to install the bootloader". (some installers
> helpfully tell you the disk size, so you know which one of the identically
> listed "6tb wdc disk" to use). Aparently the thinking is that presenting users
> with disk serial numbers will confuse them (and forger about telling them
> the physical SATA ports or SATA topology).
>
--
P. Larry Nelson (217-244-9855) | IT Administrator
457 Loomis Lab | High Energy Physics Group
1110 W. Green St., Urbana, IL | Physics Dept., Univ. of Ill.
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