When I installed Fedora on a used disk, it gave me an error message:
“Disk contains BIOS metadata, but is not part of any recognized BIOS RAID sets. Ignoring disk sdb”
I plugged this disk in a USB-based hard drive docking station on another machine that installed Fedora, and used dd to wipe the disk. It took me two days. I had 8 of the same disks that my co-workers used. So I searched on the net, and found there is a dmraid command can remove the BIOS RAID metadata.
[root@localhost ~]# dmraid -r -E /dev/sdc
Do you really want to erase “pdc” ondisk metadata on /dev/sdc ? [y/n] :y
It took me just one second! It saved me a half of month. LOL!
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By: Removing BIOS RAID Metadata | Of Penguins & Coffee on June 25, 2011
at 7:58 am
Thanks , that solved the same problem for me.
You are the best
By: David J. Ruedeman on July 7, 2011
at 1:28 pm
You made my day
By: Anonymous on August 8, 2011
at 9:04 am
You rock !
Just removed my metadata so centos6 will install … well I hope it will now :D
By: Anonymous on September 22, 2011
at 10:19 pm
Your error said sdb but you’re dmraid on sdc.
I know, I just can’t let that go :) Thanks for the tip.
By: Anonymous on October 6, 2011
at 8:30 am
So so so grateful! I have had problems with this issue in Anaconda back as far as Fedora 10, and usually worked around by using other disks. Doing a new install today I hit this and looked for bugs. There are numerous (still open) bugs filed in bugzilla on this issue! Fedora 15 and the Fedora 16 beta both have this problem too! I had been banging my head against this for a couple of hours today till I found your post. I used the Federoa 16 beta Live disk to boot; opened a terminal; ran “su” to become root, and then ran the above command. Then rebooted and finally Anaconda let me proceed. Thank-you!!
By: Anonymous on October 6, 2011
at 2:58 pm
Thanks I was used dd command without success
cheers
By: Anonymous on January 21, 2012
at 1:12 am
Thank you very much. It solved the problem for me alsa.
By: Anonymous on January 29, 2012
at 7:49 pm
Thank you so much!
I can confirm “dmraid -r -E /dev/sd[a, b, c...]” worked for me.
Been trying to install Fedora 16 on an old desktop. During install, I got the same “Disk contains BIOS metadata, but is not part of any recognized BIOS RAID sets. Ignoring disk sda” error message as author, but my drive was under sda.
Went into Terminal
entered “su” to become root
entered “dmraid -r -E /dev/sda”
when asked Do you really want to erase “pdc” ondisk metadata on /dev/sdc?, entered “y”
done deal. not sure if the bug in question is “Cannot install over an existing RAID configuration – Bugzilla: #729640″
By: Anonymous on February 5, 2012
at 8:49 pm