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Remove Linux Partitions in ESXi 5.x

Journal by miljo

So I threw a 1TB drive into one of my ESXi hosts. ESXi Doesn't play well with partitions it doesn't recognize when trying to create a new datastore. The documentation on this is crap. They mention a number of partedUtil commands for viewing partitions and deleting partitions, but for this particular disk, none of these commands worked.

I did some searching and came up with this gem.

# partedUtil mklabel /dev/disks/<disk id> msdos

This will relabel the entire drive as msdos and blow away any additional partitions. This did the trick. I'm sharing it here for my future reference.

 

Reply to: Dangerous territory

    (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 24 2015, @10:09PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 24 2015, @10:09PM (#241158) Homepage

    I'm looking at the possibility of installing Qubes on bare metal. https://www.qubes-os.org/ [qubes-os.org] I've already discovered that the old partitioning tools aren't much good with terabyte drives. Have you tried gdisk? http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ [rodsbooks.com] Some similarity to fdisk, but it handles huge drives and huge partitions better. Right now, I have a MDADM RAID5, ext4 managed by LVM working on Arch, but I'm a little worried about how Qubes will handle it. A little over 5 Tb useful space on 4 physical drives. I sure don't want to risk it being destroyed by an OS that doesn't understand it.

    I'm somewhat timid - if Qubes balks at this setup, I'll probably just forget about using it, and stay with Arch and Virtualbox. To many times, I've tried to sledgehammer my way through a poorly understood process, only to destroy data. Although my RAID is less than 1/4 full, that's just to much to risk.

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