Hello,

I rcv'd a new server from a vendor. When I try to install
RHEL 5.5 via DVD.. I get to the disk partitioning screen
and see nothing but two (relatively) small partitions with
names like:
/dev/mapper/ddf1_*

I want to access the normal DOS partition on the disks.
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
and so on...

What is best way to remove the metadata, which is likely
causing the RHEL installer to present the drives as a RAID.
I dunno what I am going to do with a 7GB RAID mirror
when I have 2 x 2 TB available.

Is it likely that the system integrator (vendor) configured the
drives with a hardware RAID controller but then removed the
controller before we got the box? Or maybe these drives were
pulled from such box and inserted into my box without a
controller?

In any event, I am merely trying to delete this metadata.
I imagine a long dd write would work however I would
like to know the proper way.

Cheers!

Hello,
Can you post the results of /sbin/fdisk -l

cheers

well... that data is already blown away. I can tell you about it.
when I ran sfdisk --list` it would show 4 primary partitions of 0 size
I believe their may have also been a comment about Linux Mapper or something indicating that.
Then when I went into fdisk and p(rint) the status, it would show no partitions.

dmraid would recognize the special paritions with the /dev label mentioned previously.
However for some reason `dmraid -eE` returned errors... perhaps because I had already
mucked with the partitions and broke them while using fdisk (attempting to delete things
partitions that I did not understand)

so finally I just dd the entire disk with zero.

Now, when I run the RHEL installer, I can see raw devices.
Success.

Cheers!