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
1\ Very helpful post.
2\ For some guys like me dmraid wont work.. In which case only option is to zero out the drive with dd. But good news is you dont have to zero out complete drive. Just zero out 1st couple and last couple of sectors. Follow commands below
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=2
fdisk -s /dev/sda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=(number_of_sectors – 20) bs=1k
number_of_sectors = output of fdisk -s /dev/sda
This worked for me.. Thought I should put it out.
—
Gattu
By: Gattu on November 5, 2012
at 8:48 am
BEEEEEE-UUUU-TTTIIIII-FUL!!!!!
Danka sehr-fiel!
By: Sean Parker on April 17, 2013
at 1:45 pm
thanks to Gattu
By: Dr Smith on October 31, 2013
at 12:04 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
Hello,
Does this command “dmraid -r -E /dev/sdx” erase the data if for example we have two operating systems installed on it? I have Ubuntu Onyx and Ubuntu Maverick, and when trying to install a Fedora based distro I also receive the said message “bios metadata … ignoring disk”.
I menction this because I would like to try a fedora based distro like fuduntu and also have the other two operating systems..
Thanks a lot. Marco Antonio
By: Marco A. Rodriguez G. on March 4, 2012
at 9:12 pm
Thanks so much for sharing. It saved me about half a day.
By: Anonymous on April 12, 2012
at 2:15 pm
2 days later after removing MBR and wiping HDD I found this post – worked a treat!
By: Anonymous on April 18, 2012
at 8:45 pm
This tip save the world from hearing many curses last night. Thanks.
By: anonymous on May 3, 2012
at 5:41 am
Thank you
;)
By: Anonymous on June 9, 2012
at 2:55 am
Thanks for this works a treat. Do not understand why Fedora and other linux disto’s just don’t ask during install if you would like to remove old metadata.
By: Jason on June 25, 2012
at 11:02 pm
[…] https://kezhong.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/how-to-remove-bios-raid-metadata-from-disk-on-fedora/ […]
By: Centos 6.2出现Disk sda contains BIOS RAID metadata解决方法 » 陈沙克日志 on July 6, 2012
at 12:39 am
Brilliant! I had to run this twice as I had pdc and sil metadata – now fedora 16 will finally install.
By: Kieron on July 20, 2012
at 7:03 am
Ty Brochacho-you hit the nail on the head with this fix. Saved my bacon!
By: Anonymous on July 27, 2012
at 10:08 am
Hi, It worked for me, but now, when the computer starts, it takes a little bit more time loading when it shows the BIOS screen (I mean, when it shows “DELL” and the setup options).
There is any way to recover this metadata?
By: Anonymous on August 7, 2012
at 9:33 pm
That was a hell of a tip! Thanx a lot.
By: Matheus Geraldini on August 16, 2012
at 2:40 pm
[…] 早合点な部分もあったので詳しく情報をあつめると、ハードウェアRAIDっぽいけど実はカード上のBIOSでソフトウェアRAIDをやっているようなRAID（俗称: Fake RAID）構成はdmraidコマンドを使って設定するらしく、この情報がHDD上に残っているのでdmraidコマンドを使ってクリアしてあげればいいとのこと。 （参考サイト: https://kezhong.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/how-to-remove-bios-raid-metadata-from-disk-on-fedora/） […]
By: “BIOS meta Data…” が表示されてCentOSがインストールできない | がちゃぽん！ on August 31, 2012
at 3:50 am
Great blog worked for me.. neede to remove data at the start and end of drive as stated by gatu
By: Anonymous on November 6, 2012
at 5:12 am
Thanks to that! saved me a lot of time, too.
By: mclien on November 14, 2012
at 3:55 am
[…] Оригинал тут: https://kezhong.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/how-to-remove-bios-raid-metadata-from-disk-on-fedora/ […]
By: Проблема Disk contains BIOS metadata | Винтик и Шунтик on November 15, 2012
at 1:33 am
Great tip. Work for us well.
By: Zhiqiang Ma on November 22, 2012
at 8:16 am
tyvm, save me some time.
By: Anonymous on December 8, 2012
at 10:13 pm
I found when I did on CentOS6.2, it didn’t work. I used the way as below:
# parted /dev/sdc
# mklabel msdos
By: Anonymous on January 22, 2013
at 12:26 pm
That solves my problem too. Many many thanks!!! :-)
By: Anonymous on March 15, 2013
at 5:34 pm
That solves my problem too. Many many thanks!! :-)
By: Anonymous on March 15, 2013
at 5:34 pm
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Judy
By: Allison on May 17, 2013
at 5:17 am
mdadm –zero-suberblock /dev/sdx – faster way to do this, also there is no dmraid in minimal RHEL installation but mdadm is.
By: Anonymous on May 17, 2013
at 5:57 am
mdam –zero-superblock /dev/sdx
By: Anonymous on August 12, 2013
at 9:33 am
\-\- zero
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at 9:33 am
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mdadm –zero-superblok /dev/sdx worked for me
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By: comment pirater compte facebook on April 18, 2014
at 11:53 pm
The dd operation described above..
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=2
fdisk -s /dev/sda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=(number_of_sectors – 20) bs=1k
number_of_sectors = output of fdisk -s /dev/sda
did NOT work for me, so I arbitrarily increased “20” to 800.
I assume that this metadata is somewhere near the near of the drive, and the goal is to avoid having to zero the whole thing. zeroing a few K bytes doesn’t take any time.
By: dave pullin on April 26, 2014
at 11:19 am
(and it worked!)
By: dave pullin on April 26, 2014
at 2:15 pm
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By: » [How To] Usar un disco RAID en un nuevo equipo Trasteando on June 30, 2014
at 11:34 am
awesome. Had same issue and it worked like a charm. Was getting ready to sit down and wade through ton of pages and documentation to fix this and ran across your blog. One simple command fixed the problem in no time. On to install CentOS so I can get my OpenVS system up and running.
Cheers!!!
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[…] How to remove BIOS RAID metadata from disk on Fedora … – 2011-06-14 · 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…. […]
By: Fedora Hard Disk Recovery on April 17, 2015
at 6:03 am
[…] https://kezhong.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/how-to-remove-bios-raid-metadata-from-disk-on-fedora/ […]
By: Fake raid metadata | Words on May 2, 2015
at 1:59 pm
Thanks much! worked for me!
By: Anonymous on June 6, 2016
at 8:19 am
dmraid -x
By: Anonymous on October 13, 2016
at 3:14 am