Unrecognized disk label using hard drive

I have a old hard drive that I am trying to use. I don't remember if it was used in a RAID with lvm or zfs or another format.

When I boot in Windows 10, I can see it under disks and it loads with no errors (the first time it did ask me to update the mbr) and it works well.

Under linux using ubuntu live cd is another story. I tried :

• Gparted: can't create a partition and have the error unrecognized disk label
• dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M, no result [this solution][1], no result
• used parted: , no result

Any ideas to solve this?

3 Answers

In Windows, launch diskpart, and identify all the disks in your Windows filesystem with list disk

Select the disk in question with sel disk 2 (change the number to match the number of the drive in question) then do list part and list vol. Anything there you need to save?

Once you are satisfied you can proceed, do clean and your disk will be ready for reuse with gparted.

Under Linux the combination of the blkid and the wipefs commands will do what you need:

• blkid will tell you, what the kernel sees on that disk
• wipefs will allow you to remove anything that is in the way

Refer to the man pages for details, but start at blkid /dev/sdX and wipefs -a /dev/sdX. As usual: Be sure you work on the correct disk!

Bios configuration. It was a mix of AVAHI and IDE. Switching everything to either AVAHI or IDE solved the issue.