After several experiments with Ubuntu mini, I have discovered something strange.
When I want to start a new installation, I boot the system to the Ubuntu mini image, I let it continue to the language selection menu and then I press Esc and start a terminal session using the corresponding option in the menu that appears. In that session, I issue dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M count=1
to erase the first 4 MB of the hard disk. Then I reboot the system and start the installation the normal way on a completely wiped disk, or so I thought...
As the installation continues, when it reaches the point where it asks for a host name, it always displays the computer name the previous installation use to use, before I issued the dd
command.
Secondly, in all the cases I had used the internal hard disk on a software RAID configuration before erasing it, using dd
, the new installation would always find thet there still is an active RAID array on the disk after it had been erased by dd
. In order to delete that array I have to use the corresponding option in the Configure software array menu.
The strange thing is that everything else, like previous partitions and the previous partition table itself, have been erased completely. How come the information I mentioned above is still maintained after dd
was used? Why aren't they deleted too?
Thank you.
0 Answers