On Aug 9, 2014, at 9:07 PM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm(a)htt-consult.com> wrote:
On 08/08/2014 06:11 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Aug 8, 2014, at 2:16 PM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm(a)htt-consult.com> wrote:
>
>> On 08/08/2014 03:00 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>> On Aug 8, 2014, at 4:29 AM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm(a)htt-consult.com>
wrote:
>>>
>>>> Unfortuately there is no such command to delete all partitions, though
you kind of can do it by changing the table type, say from msdos to gpt.
>>> I forgot to address this specifically. First, you really should delete the
filesystem signature before deleting partitions. This makes the filesystem invalid, and
thus things like libblkid and libparted aren't going to recognize latent (stale)
filesystems. The tool for this is wipefs part of util-linux. Use it like this for
example:
>>>
>>> wipefs -a /dev/sdb[123]
>>>
>>> That will delete the fs signatures on all file systems found on partitions 1
through 3 on disk sdb. The partition table still contains entries of course, but the
filesystems in them are invalidated.
>>>
>>> Next, if you want to get rid of all partitions, you can also use wipefs on a
whole disk.
>> wipefs -a /dev/sdb
> That will only remove signatures from either an MBR or GPT. It will not remove
signatures from filesystems. You really should remove filesystem signatures first with
/dev/sdX[1234…] and then remove the partition map sig with sdX alone.
I was very unclear, that is what I meant, that I got the remove sigs for each partition,
but I am assuming that the command for the partition part was what I gave. So the whole
set is:
wipefs -a /dev/sdb1
wipefs -a /dev/sdb2
wipefs -a /dev/sdb3
Sure. These can be combined as:
wipefs -a /dev/sdb[123]
There are quite a few examples of this, including making LVM pvs, and Btrfs volumes, e.g.
mkfs.btrfs -mraid1 -draid1 /dev/sdb[123]
And also for multiple disk partition table obliteration:
wipefs -a /dev/sd[bcd]
I like wipefs because it tells you what it's removing, so you can restore it, and also
has an option for backing up that which it's removing so you can easily restore it if
you got sloppy with the command and bashed the wrong device. Not that this should be habit
forming, like being able to make a proper gimlet.
So much nicer what anaconda does in the kickstart with 'clearpart' !
Yes and blivet makes an appearance in F21 proper although I'm not sure yet if this is
an API or how it'll get leveraged. Another pony trick is system-storage-manager
package, which takes the form of ssm on the command line; but this tool is post partition
management, working with LVM and filesystems.
Chris Murphy