xRAID disks....

DA Forsyth iwrtech at iwr.ru.ac.za
Thu Jun 12 07:25:37 UTC 2008


On 10 Jun 2008 , Erik Trulsson entreated about
 "Re: xRAID disks....":

> > I suspect the raidinfo is stored on the disk somewhere and a suitable 
> > 'dd' command can erase it.  but where and how?
> 
> That kind of information is usually stored last on the disk (where it is
> least likely to be overwritten by filesystems, partitioning info, or boot
> loaders), so if you overwrite the last couple of KBs on those disks you will
> probably be fine.
> (If you want to be certain you can always use 'dd' to nuke all the
> information on the disk.  That will take longer time, but you get the extra
> advantage of testing all the blocks on the disk so that they work
> correctly.)
> 
> For the first you could do something like:
>  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad1 bs=1m skip=76318
> which should overwrite the last MB of ad1 with zeros.

I tried to overwrite just the last sector, but though dd reported 
success (and took ages, seems it has to do a read for every skipped 
sector) the data was still there when I used dd to display it.
I have just done a search for sector editing software but I cannot 
find anything in ports.  Starting to think of writing some C... how 
hard can it be just to seek to a given sector and scribble zeros on 
it?

so then I did this (overwrite last megabyte)and that did in fact zero 
the last megabyte, taking away the raid info AND all the partition 
info.  not exactly what I wanted but I was going to repartition 
anyway.
but I now have another disk with data and raid info on it and will 
need a way to nondestructively remove the raid info there.

I did try the suggestion of 'atacontrol' but it did nothing, I also 
tried 'gmirror clear' but that gives an error message, maybe I should 
first create a gmirror then clear it.  or maybe try the 'forget' 
command....

hmmm, thinking now the gmirror create/remove route will probably 
work.  let me try it on a blankish disk and see....


--
       DA Fo rsyth            Network Supervisor
Principal Technical Officer -- Institute for Water Research
http://www.ru.ac.za/institutes/iwr/




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