Completely discontinuing an array

Completely discontinuing an array

[Bill Davidsen]

Since I have been doing a lot of array creation related to the RAID-5 
performance thread, I want to make the array "go away" so nothing tries 
to start, stop, or otherwise use the array. I tried setting the 
superblock to zero, but that results in boot warnings for every 
partition. I can change the partition type to something other than RAID, 
but that rapidly gets ugly since I really want some partitions around 
for ad-hoc testing.

Is there something which will stop an array and dismember it? Like:
  mdadm -S --nuke /dev/md5
or similar, to stop the array and mark it as not in use so boot won't 
try doing anything with it.

If there isn't such a feature, or an easy way to get the desired end 
result, could you consider that a minor feature request? Preferably an 
option to stopping the array, perhaps a magic superblock other than 
zero, to tell the boot "I know it's dead, deal with it."

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979