Description of problem: In a classroom or lab environment when multiple installs are being performed on a machine, anaconda and clearpart don't clear enough. In a FC3 test lab, we are seeing freshly kickstarted machines having ext3 labels such as "/boot1", "/var/1", and "/usr1". The kickstart lines we are using are as follows: clearpart --all --initlabel part /boot --fstype ext3 --ondisk=hda --size 100 part / --fstype ext3 --ondisk=hda --size 2060 part swap --ondisk=hda --size 512 part /usr --fstype ext3 --ondisk=hda --size 7925 part /tmp --fstype ext3 --ondisk=hda --size 300 part /var --fstype ext3 --ondisk=hda --size 500 In a related issue, when we create software RAID or LVM using the exact same commands on the fresh install as were used during the previous install we get a bunch of complaints from the raidtools/mdadm and lvm tools about "existing" volumes, etc. This is very common in a classroom environment. Proposal: Either by default, or with an additional switch to clearpart have it zero out (dd if=/dev/zero ...) the first one megabyte of each pre-existing partition before it blows away the table and creates a new table. Thanks for your consideration.
Maybe we should try to use parted's clobber stuff...
I don't have any insight on the way it should be implemented properly. Here is our current workaround: %pre for i in `(fdisk -l /dev/hda ; fdisk -l /dev/sda) | grep -v Ext | egrep '^/dev/.da[0-9]*' | sed 's/ .*//' | sort -r`; do dd if=/dev/zero of=$i count=1 bs=1M; done
This sounds similar to bug #145732 ...
clobber doesn't look all that helpful. I'll look into implementing our own stuff in anaconda for wiping out labels and other identifying filesystem information.
We have clobbering now