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

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Toni Mueller <support at oeko.net> [2009.09.29.1327 +0200]:
> 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

So /dev/sda is being used by e.g. LVM or something similar, and
mdadm cannot open it exclusively. I think this was recently fixed
upstream, but I am not sure. There's also another bug on this, but
I am too swamped to check right now.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at d.o>      Related projects:
: :'  :  proud Debian developer               http://debiansystem.info
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck    http://vcs-pkg.org
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
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