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.
MailTo: [email protected] | http://www.brf-llc.com/lnelson/
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