<p>disks that mate for life? </p>
<p>Wolf Halton<br>
--<br>
<a href="http://wolfhalton.info">http://wolfhalton.info</a> <br>
Apache developer:<br>
<a href="mailto:wolfhalton@apache.org">wolfhalton@apache.org</a></p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Jun 30, 2013 9:45 PM, "JD" <<a href="mailto:jdp@algoloma.com">jdp@algoloma.com</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Your experience is seen a few times every month on the Ubuntu Forums.<br>
<br>
RAID tools, definitely mdadm, leave RAID information on the drive in the form of<br>
a superblock, so to reuse a drive, we need to remove that "RAID" tag from the<br>
physical disk. I think mdadm has an option to do it, though I've never had an<br>
issue reusing former mdadm RAID HDDs in other systems. --zero-superblock seems<br>
to ring a bell for me. As usual, check the man page for your specific installed<br>
tools.<br>
<br>
OTOH, some disks like each other and really, REALLY want to stay together. Seems<br>
sorta cool that they try so very hard. Huh?<br>
<br>
<br>
On 06/30/2013 09:31 PM, Chuck Payne wrote:<br>
> If you are like me and recycle things when you can. One thing to watch<br>
> out for, that I never thought to check on. What is really written to a<br>
> hard drive.<br>
><br>
> I had a NAS die a while back, that left me 5 health drives. While<br>
> upgrading my server, I used one of the drives to replace a failed<br>
> drive in my server.<br>
><br>
> Well when I went to write the file system for the drive, I kept<br>
> getting a very strange error, that the new drive was in use by the<br>
> system. "WTF!", how can this be? I ran fdisk and gparted. Both<br>
> partition the drive correct but when I when to write the file system.<br>
> Again, I got the error that the drive was in use.<br>
><br>
> I reboot changed how my SATA drive acted from IDE to ACHI, since I<br>
> don't have any more IDE in the server. I tried again. Same error.<br>
> Well I looked in dmesg saw the drive, but I saw that the first slice<br>
> was in use by soft raid (md). Say what? Sure enough I cat /proc/md<br>
> and there it was. Again, excuse the use, but "WTF!".<br>
><br>
> When the distro I use, did a scan for existing partitions. I thought I<br>
> had blasted all the partition, the showed was using XFS /dev/sdx1, but<br>
> there was a hidden partition. One the OS picked up on, but fdisk and<br>
> gpart did not. The partition, I found out was where the raid wrote the<br>
> it information, it showed up as MD-512 on my partition tool.<br>
><br>
> I used the partition tool that comes with my distro to remove the<br>
> hidden partition and I am able to use the drive.<br>
><br>
> I wanted to share this because, to this day I haven't seen this. My<br>
> distro saw that hidden partition and thought, ok there is a soft raid,<br>
> lets set it up, even though there the other four drives were missing.<br>
><br>
> So I guess next time I recycle a drive, I will use a nuke program and<br>
> not hope that fdisk or gparted will get the drive done because it<br>
> didn't this time.<br>
><br>
> I wanted to share this just in cause anyone else hits a drive that you<br>
> can't write too, that you just add to a system.<br>
><br>
> I am not sure if this part 3.x kernel.<br>
><br>
> Any thoughts? Feed back is welcome.<br>
><br>
> --<br>
> Terror PUP a.k.a<br>
> Chuck "PUP" Payne<br>
><br>
> <a href="tel:%28678%29%20636-9678" value="+16786369678">(678) 636-9678</a><br>
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