12.04 installer doesn't detect my disk, yet fdisk and disk utility both do

[kerryhall]

I'm trying to do a fresh install of 12.04 64 bit.

I had two drives in an old machine in a RAID 1. I decided to ditch the RAID 1, and threw one of the drives into a new machine.

I booted into the 12.04 64 bit installer. The disk is detected as /dev/sda from doing an fdisk -l. I have formatted this disk as ext4 (also tried xfs and empty) I can dd if=/dev/zero of=test.img on this disk (ext4 or xfs) and it works fine. Tried formatting as mbr and gpt as well. Tried also blanking the disk with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

However, the installer simply doesn't show it as being available. Although it *does* show up under "Device for boot loader installation"!!

Any ideas? Is it possible there is some sort of RAID metadata being stored in some sort of flash memory or similar on the drive that is preventing this disk from being detected by the installer?

[darkod]

Yeah, you should remove the raid meta data with:
sudo dmraid -E -r /dev/sda

Confirm when it asks you to. That should get you going.

[kerryhall]

Awesome, thanks! I had no idea that data existed. Where on the drive is that stored? This is all brand new hardware besides the disk. I thought for sure that

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda would remove *all* data (besides smart output which is read only anyway right?)

I will give that a try and report back. Cheers!

[kerryhall]

Dude, you rule! Running that command solved my problem.

Two things I am wondering now. I will update this thread if I solve them on my own.

1. Where on the drive is this raid meta data stored? Admittedly, I didn't wait for dd to finish, so the meta data could have still remained on there.

2. Why doesn't the Ubuntu install have a "It looks like this drive used to be part of a RAID array. Would you like to wipe the metadata?" I can suggest this feature to the Ubuntu devs.

Cheers!