Folks
I've encountered situations where I want to reuse a hard-drive. I do
not want to preserve anything on the drive, and I'm not concerned
about 'securely erasing' old content. I just want to be able to
define it as an Physical Volume (in a logical volume set), or make it
a ZFS disk, or sometimes make it a simple EXT3, ExFAT or NTFS
disk. However, old 'signatures' get in the way and Linux sometimes
refuses to let me proceed. I know that a fool-proof solution is to
use the "dd if=/dev/zero bs=32768 oflag=direct" on the disk, but when
we're talking USB-connected hard drives of 8 TB, that's an operation
that can take days.
The disk in question might even have been corrupted. This would make
using 'zpool destroy' to clear out a ZFS disk, or
I've tried erasing the first megabyte of the disk, but there are ZFS
or LVM structures that get in the way. So, does anyone have an
efficient way to erase structures from a disk such that it can be reused?
Something like
-erase first N blocks (block defined as 4096)
- Erase <number> blocks starting at block <number>
- erase last <number> blocks
At least such an algorithm would be quicker than erasing 8 TB of data.
David
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