[CLUE-Tech] question about fdisk

[David Anselmi]

dahanson at thegeek.nu wrote:
> See, that's the weird thing. The drive has no partitions on it, but it does 
> have a BSD disklabel. When I run fdisk, it says "Detected an OSF/1 disklabel 
> on /tmp/sda, entering disklabel mode." Then it gives me a "BSD disklabel 
> command" prompt. It seems that the disklabel exists independently of whatever 
> partitions may be on the drive.
> 
>>just use fdisk to write over the partition type with a new type.
>>e.g.:
>>fdisk /dev/hda
>>t	<< change partition type command
>>x	<< your partition you want to change, use command 'l' for list of types
>>83	<< linux ext2/3 type 
>>w

The partition type is independent of the partition table type.  BSD 
disklabels, DOS partition tables, whatever, have a spot to record that info.

I assume you're using x86 hardware, if not speak up.

There doesn't seem to be a command to fdisk to change your partition 
table type.  You might try using cfdisk.  Since it doesn't understand 
BSD disklabels it may write a DOS table for you.  This should also work:

dd if=/dev/zero  of=/dev/hda1  bs=512  count=1

This will write zeros over the first sector of the disk and should erase 
the disklabel.  Be careful if the disk has any data on it.

Does the RAID want a partition table at all?  Sometimes RAID drives 
require a special low level format that is different than a normal disk 
uses.

Dave