Thanks to this guy I finally got my 1tb disk initialized to use in my raid array – it had some garbage about being attached to another raid that I couldn’t remove or overwrite, so I finally plugged it into a usb dock and into my linux laptop and used dd to wipe the first and last 200 sectors or so 😉

1\ Very helpful post.
2\ For some guys like me dmraid wont work.. In which case only option is to zero out the drive with dd. But good news is you dont have to zero out complete drive. Just zero out 1st couple and last couple of sectors. Follow commands below

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=2
fdisk -s /dev/sda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=(number_of_sectors – 20) bs=1k

number_of_sectors = output of fdisk -s /dev/sda

This worked for me.. Thought I should put it out.

—

Gattu

The original link to the dmraid solution, which wouldn’t work for me for some reason…

https://kezhong.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/how-to-remove-bios-raid-metadata-from-disk-on-fedora/

I picked up a new acer laptop last weekend for 170$ from Canada Computers.

On one hand, the keyboard is crap, it’s a bit slow, the screen has poor viewing angles and the wifi is a bit flakey.

On the other, it was 170$, the screen is minimally adequate, battery life is decent, has usb3, and after I replace the HD with a SSD, there will be no moving parts because it’s fanless. Did I mention it’s 170$? I also like the multi-touch touchpad. My current laptop is a 10 years old IBM ThinkPad – the keyboard is glorious. Everything else is suffering… although CrunchBang linux actually made it seem a lot faster than it was.

Since I need win7+ on the move, and since I already have a win7 desktop that’s only 8 years old and was such a beast then that it still functions now, I picked up the cheapest thing that met my needs and I’m happy with it. In a year or three maybe I’ll see something better, or maybe I won’t need windows anymore. I think I want a luxury, low power laptop and I couldn’t find anything out there for me this year. Maybe I’ll have better luck next year.