Clearing of 8GB of disk before partioning

[jomy]

Hi,

I am using anaconda installer and in the loader, before partioning the disks present i want to erase 8GB of disks. So i thought of writing 0 to the device file sda,sdb ....When i am trying to open the file in the path /dev/sda, Its giving me no file or directory. Can anyone tell me what is the path of the device sda. before partioning ?
I want to know the path of the device file(sda,sdb...) before partiioning the disks.

Thanks
Jomy

[jaboua]

That depends if you use SCSI/SATA disks or ATA disks or whatever...

However, assuming you use ATA-drives, here's an example to write zeros out all the master of the furst IDE-bus:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

[jomy]

I am using SCSI disks,but when I am trying to open the file /dev/sda
before partioning.It gives me an error No such file or directory.

Can I use system command to execute the dd command from the loader.

[jaboua]

Hmmm... There are multiple distros using anaconda, which are you trying to install? If your distro uses devfs, you may find it under for example /dev/discs/disc0/disc or something like that (however, devfs never spread that much...). There is also a chanse that you have to give arguments before booting the install CD to load the scsi-drivers, try pressing F1 - F9 when it asks which kernel to boot and such, maybe that will explain which arguments to pass in order to use scsi...

[jomy]

I am using anaconda 10.1.0.2-1 rpm for Fedora Core -3
Can I call a script which clear all the disks in the %pre of the ks.cfg file.

[jomy]

Okay,

I got an idea, I will try to run a script using dd command to clear the disks upto size of 8GB in the %pre part of kickstart configuration file .

But I have doubt regarding the dd command.If i need to clear last 2MB of the disk having disk size 10GB,how will I give the dd command

Thanks for the help

Jomy

[jaboua]

Okay,

I got an idea, I will try to run a script using dd command to clear the disks upto size of 8GB in the %pre part of kickstart configuration file .

But I have doubt regarding the dd command.If i need to clear last 2MB of the disk having disk size 10GB,how will I give the dd command

Thanks for the help

Jomy

After reading the manpage again, I think it would be something like this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 ibs=XXXX

I think you should replace XXX with the number of kilobytes before the starting point of the erase.