Bug#548883: mdadm: please fix functionality to remove RAID superblocks from drives

[Toni Mueller]

Package: mdadm
Version: 2.6.7.2-3
Severity: normal


Hello,

I repeatedly run into trouble trying to nuke ill-configured drives to
make them usable again (lest these bogus RAIDs show up eg. in d-i and
prevent me from properly configuring the drives).

I am already aware of 'mdadm --zero-superblock' and friends, but have to
note that these just don't work. Eg. I was unable to use this command
from a shell, spawned from d-i, to remove bogus RAID0 superblocks from
the drives.

I got error messages like this:

~ # mdadm --zero-superblock --force /dev/sda
mdadm: Couldn't open /dev/sda for write - not zeroing


Kind regards,
--Toni++


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.3
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (450, 'testing'), (250, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-xen-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages mdadm depends on:
ii  debconf                   1.5.24         Debian configuration management sy
ii  libc6                     2.7-18         GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  lsb-base                  3.2-20         Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  makedev                   2.3.1-88       creates device files in /dev
ii  udev                      0.125-7+lenny3 /dev/ and hotplug management daemo

Versions of packages mdadm recommends:
ii  module-init-tools             3.4-1      tools for managing Linux kernel mo
ii  postfix [mail-transport-agent 2.5.5-1.1  High-performance mail transport ag

mdadm suggests no packages.

-- debconf information excluded