[ale] Just an FYI share

[Chuck Payne]

If you are like me and recycle things when you can. One thing to watch
out for, that I never thought to check on. What is really written to a
hard drive.

I had a NAS die a while back, that left me 5 health drives. While
upgrading my server, I used one of the drives to replace a failed
drive in my server.

Well when I went to write the file system for the drive, I kept
getting a very strange error, that the new drive was in use by the
system.  "WTF!", how can this be? I ran fdisk and gparted. Both
partition the drive correct but when I when to write the file system.
Again, I got the error that the drive was in use.

I reboot changed how my SATA drive acted from IDE to ACHI, since I
don't have any more IDE in the server.  I tried again. Same error.
Well I looked in dmesg saw the drive, but I saw that the first slice
was in use by soft raid  (md).  Say what? Sure enough I cat /proc/md
and there it was. Again, excuse the use, but "WTF!".

When the distro I use, did a scan for existing partitions. I thought I
had blasted all the partition, the showed was using XFS /dev/sdx1, but
there was a hidden partition. One the OS picked up on, but fdisk and
gpart did not. The partition, I found out was where the raid wrote the
it information, it showed up as MD-512 on my partition tool.

I used the partition tool that comes with my distro to remove the
hidden partition and I am able to use the drive.

I wanted to share this because, to this day I haven't seen this. My
distro saw that hidden partition and thought, ok there is a soft raid,
lets set it up, even though there the other four drives were missing.

So I guess next time I recycle a drive, I will use a nuke program and
not hope that fdisk or gparted will get the drive done because it
didn't this time.

I wanted to share this just in cause anyone else hits a drive that you
can't write too, that you just add to a system.

I am not sure if this part 3.x kernel.

Any thoughts? Feed back is welcome.

--
Terror PUP a.k.a
Chuck "PUP" Payne

(678) 636-9678
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