Wipe Raid Drive and (maybe) Reinstall OS?

[TheCodah]

I received a new desktop with 2 , 1TB harddrives made into raid (1?). I installed Fedora 14 and set up the hard drives to mirror. All seemed fine until I realized the wireless card that was installed linux fedora 14 doesn't recognize... I tried bunch of little things in terminal and couldn't get it to work. Now I just want to wipe the drives completely and have it without a setup OS as if i just received it from the factory. DBAN won't wipe it because it's in raid though, so what do I do?

I'm just scared that it won't recognize the identical drives as raid after the wipe. The goal was to have them mirror each other.

How do I go about wiping the drives as to be ready for a fresh OS install?

(2 terabytes to wipe -__- imagine the hours... )

Thank you for your time!

[lomcevak]

Assuming you have hardware RAID then I've been in a similar situation. What I did was break the RAID-1 set so you have JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). Then I used DBAN to erase the 2 disks. You then can recreate the RAID-1 set.

[TheCodah]

How would I go about as to break the array? Does it have to be done while the computer is on, do i change the settings in the motherboard bios? Motherboard bios gives me three options IDE, RAID, and AHCI. If you remember some of the steps please provide them? thank you!

[nujinini]

If you want to wipe your HDs clean and make it ready for a fresh install, you can execute this in the terminal

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/route_to_your_hd bs=512 count=1

It may take a long time.

Good luck! ;

[TheCodah]

This will work even though it's in raid? I don't doubt u just makin sure I stress it to get thhe right results. So I execute that code while logged in on linux and it will restart my computer and wipe both my drives clean so I may install a fresh os?

[nujinini]

This will work even though it's in raid?

Haven't used raid yet but I'm quite sure this code will wipe your HD pretty neatly.

So I execute that code while logged in on linux and it will restart my computer and wipe both my drives clean so I may install a fresh os?

Yes you execute it as root in the terminal. It will not restart your computer actually. More of like "hey it's hanging" since nothing would seem happening but after it has done it's job, your HD will be prepared for a fresh set-up.

Anyways, I think after you have cleaned both your discs, you have to do RAID set-up again because the original RAID set-up will also be wiped out.

[lomcevak]

It sounds like you have hardware RAID so Linux sees it as just a disk. If you do what nujinini suggests you won't have to rebuild the RAID-1 set.

As for my suggestion I can't help any further since I know nothing about your system's hardware. You would have to find the manual for your hardware and read-up on how to delete and then recreate the RAID-1 set.