setup-storage fails to partition sometimes

[Ian Kelling]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016, at 12:28 PM, Ingo Wichmann wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> we reinstall our training laptops very frequently. At the end of a
> training, all kinds of storage configuration can be left on the
> harddisks. Since January I'm using setup-storage. And my experience is,
> that it often fails to clean up old configuration, and therefore fails
> to partition the new system.
> 
> As a workaround I introduced the following two lines in a hook:
> 
> ============================================================
> [ -b ${BOOT_DEVICE}2 ] && wipefs -a -f ${BOOT_DEVICE}2
> parted ${BOOT_DEVICE} 'mklabel msdos yes' # this is sometimes
> #necessary, often useless and produces warnings sometimes.
> ============================================================
> 
> setup-storage calls already 'wipefs -a' on several occasions. I think
> 'wipefs -a -f' would be more reliable.
> 


What specific error did you see? 

I wonder if -f would affect partition schemes which keep
some existing partitions.