preclear and partitions

[Haruno]

I'm currently preclearing a wd scorpio blue 320gb harddrive to use as cache drive.

 

This drive used to have one big partition and a 100mb partition as win7 bootdrive.

 

Now I'm curious if the preclear will remove the partitions? Or will the partitions still be available?

Will I have to use partitioning software to get rid of the partitions?

[Joe L.]

I'm currently preclearing a wd scorpio blue 320gb harddrive to use as cache drive.

 

This drive used to have one big partition and a 100mb partition as win7 bootdrive.

 

Now I'm curious if the preclear will remove the partitions? Or will the partitions still be available?

Will I have to use partitioning software to get rid of the partitions?

The old partitions will be gone.  You need do nothing to remove them.

 

The preclear process installs a single partition, from sector 63/64 to the end of the drive.  It is part of the unRAID "precleared signature."

(On drives > 2.2TB, it installs a GPT "protective" partition, with the MBR made to look as if the entire disk is allocated from sector 1 onward)

[Haruno]

The preclearing went fine and indeed left nothing of the old partitions.

 

Now I when adding this drive as cache drive to my system, it says that the drive is unformatted.  There is currently nothing on this drive so I don't mind formatting it again, but is it possible that this indicates a problem with the drive?

[FreeMan]

I'm a rookie, too, but I'm pretty sure that after writing a 0 to every single bit on the hard drive, there will be no formatting at all. You have to let unRAID  format the drive, then it will be good to go for whatever purpose you're using it for. In my (very limited) experience, only the parity disk doesn't get any (obvious to me) formatting.

[Sccrluk9]

I'm a rookie, too, but I'm pretty sure that after writing a 0 to every single bit on the hard drive, there will be no formatting at all. You have to let unRAID  format the drive, then it will be good to go for whatever purpose you're using it for. In my (very limited) experience, only the parity disk doesn't get any (obvious to me) formatting.

 

Hes correct. The preclear just wipes the disk and puts the unRaid signature. All this does is let unRaid know that it doesnt need to wipe the drive. Just mark the drive as your cache and format it. It only takes a minute or so.

[Haruno]

Thanks for the info, that was what I thought as well. The strange thing is that with my other  drives 2 2TB WD EARX, it didn't ask me to format them after the preclear (or I can't remember), that's why I had doubts.

 

Anyway the drive is formatted and works properly now.