Re: [opensuse] Trouble reformatting a HDD

On Thursday 06 March 2008 10:50:02 pm Patrick Shanahan wrote:

* Greg Freemyer [03-06-08 22:42]:

...

If you want to totally eliminate the current partition setup, then this will do it:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX count=1

reboot (to force the partition table to be re-read)

At that point Yast should work fine.

I'm sure there is a way to force the reread of the partition table without reboot, but I don't know what the command is.

It is an external drive, iirc. Wouldn't disconnecting it from the system and reattaching force a re-read? Maybe to a different port... -- Patrick Shanahan Plainfield, Indiana, USA HOG # US1244711 http://wahoo.no-ip.org Photo Album: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/gallery2 Registered Linux User #207535 @ http://counter.li.org

I guess so, I took some what of a more forcefull approach and turned off the external via the power switch and turned it back on. After that YaST was able to remove the partitions and created a new one in XFS. For some reason when the partition table was read the first time it listed a /dev/sdb7 which was not there the second time it read it. So I guess I got that error because I tried to remove a partition what never existed.