--- On Fri, 4/2/10, aurfalien@gmail.com aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:

From: aurfalien@gmail.com aurfalien@gmail.com Subject: [CentOS] partition woes (mapper/isw_bdihgcgahe_Volume0p2) To: "CentOS mailing list" centos@centos.org Date: Friday, April 2, 2010, 8:03 PM Hi,

I found 2 identical drives lying around and put them into a system.

When booting from a Centos 5.x installer, and when being presented  with the formatting option (disk druid), it says I have 1 volume of;

mamapper/isw_bdihgcgahe_Volume0p2

I can't seem to get rid of it.  I have 2 physical disks but disk druid  is seeing 1 volume thats the same size as one of the 2 identical drives.

I've tried everything from yanking the 2nd drive, installing Centos  with 1 drive, then installing the second drive and doing;

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb

... to even installing diff OS's like Ubuntu and Windows which see 2  individual disks where I repartition/reformat the drives.

Seems as though I can't truly re write a part of the master boot  record or some other area.

I'm pretty feeble with this crap so can any one help me get a clue on  what to do?

These drives may have been in some hard ware raided system of the  past, am unsure and no one here knows.

1) turn off raid in your bios

2) type the below command to erase meta data for the raid on the desired drive dmraid -E -r /dev/sdX

if needed, turn the raid back on (so you can use it for single drives)