Re: Possible to delete RAID metadata from hard drives?

Previously Howard Griffin <hrg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is there any way to remove/delete/deactivate RAID metadata (aka
"signatures") from my hard drives? A long time ago I had the drives in
a RAID set, but quickly reconsidered and decided to use them as
independent drives. My disaster-recovery CD (for restoration of a
disk image) boots into SuSE Linux (with DMRAID) and insists on seeing
the two drives as a RAID set because of the metadata present on them.
Thus, the disaster-recovery CD is useless. I want to remove the
metadata from these drives so the recovery CD will see them as
separate drives. I have gone into the SATA/RAID BIOS for my Silicon
Image 3112 controller, but it reports that no RAID sets exist and that
there are no conflicts to resolve. Can anyone advise? Would the
DMRAID tool allow me to deactivate the metadata? Many thanks.

Complete disk/parition blanking under Linux:

cat /dev/zero > /dev/hd<target> (or /dev/sd<target> for SCSI/SATA)

or with comfortable progress output

dd_rescue -w /dev/zero /dev/hd<target> (see above)

This will remove any data from the drive, including the
matadata. If this is Linux software RAID, you can speed things
up by overwtriting only the last MBs of the raid devices
(drive or partition), since the dm stores the RAID superblock
there. Use option -S <size - 100MB, e.g.> of dd_rescue. I don't
know whether SuSe has dd_rescue, but Knoppix does.

Arno
.

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