I've used sfdisk to do this in the past, if you want to keep only the first partition, you can do something like this in a %pre: sfdisk -d /dev/sda > /tmp/sfdisk.sda egrep '^(unit|/dev/sda1 )' /tmp/sfdisk.sda | sfdisk Note that in this example there is a space after sda1, which may be important if you have a lot of partitions and don't want it to keep sda10 or sda11 for example. You can also replace the egrep with whatever you want to do to keep the correct partitions. For example, if you want to just keep the Linux partitions (type 83), you could do this: (egrep '^units' /tmp/sfdisk.sda; egrep 'ID=( 5|83)' /tmp/sfdisk.sda) | sfdisk You may or may not need the 5 (the extended partition) depending on your requirements. I've also setup systems to keep the first linux partition and the first swap partition like this: %pre sfdisk -d /dev/sda > /tmp/sfdisk.sda ( head -3 /tmp/sfdisk.sda ( grep Id=82 /tmp/sfdisk.sda | head -1 grep Id=83 /tmp/sfdisk.sda | head -1 ) | sort ) | sfdisk (These systems didn't have anything I wanted to keep on the extended partition, so keep that in mind.)
thank you, I'll try that later. That's exactly what I was looking for. -steve