Reinitializing partition tables

Reinitializing partition tables

Had an interesting problem... trying to install Windows 7 on an old XP machine that had RAID turned on.  Tried to disable the BIOS level RAID, and do a new install.

The Windows 7 installation failed because a couple of reasons.  At first it could not see the disks.  After fiddling with the BIOS settings, the installer saw 2 out of 3 disks, but could not install to them.  It complained that the version of NTFS was unsupported.  I suspected that the drives had left over stuff from the RAID configuration.

Recommendation from a friend was to nuke the partition table and start from scratch.  Did this by booting off of a Fedora Live DVD, bringing up a terminal window and using dd to overwrite the start of the disks:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=63k count=100
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=63k count=100
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=63k count=100

Success!