RAID configuration failed during install

[Tor Martin Slåen]

Hi everyone,

I guess this problem would affect the entire chain of ubuntu versions, but  
I subscribe to this list, so here it goes.

I had some problems getting a server to work today with my RAID  
configuration.

I usually install servers with 2xRAID0 on the system disks, one partition  
/dev/md0 for swap, and one /dev/md1 for the root filesystem. I create two  
partitions on each disk before I configure the RAID. Usually, this works  
like a charm, but today this configuration failed. It seemingly created  
the raid arrays as it should, but after install and first boot, I got an  
errormessage saying that it was not able to mount root partition  
(/dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxxx) and was dropped to a rescue shell. I examined  
the RAID partitions, and saw that mdadm tried to assemble the swap array  
using /dev/sd[ab], not /dev/sd[ab]1 (notice the '1') which I had  
configured it to do. The same goes for the root array.

I tried running through the installer again (after zeroing superblocks and  
dd'ing about 400K from /dev/zero to both /dev/sd[ab]). I notised that  
after creating the RAID partitions and starting the RAID configuration  
tool, it would not recognize /dev/sd[ab][12], but could only recognize  
/dev/sd[ab] (the whole disk).

I could not get the installer to create partitions which could be  
recognized by the RAID configuration tool, so I had to use TTY2 to  
manually partition the disks using fdisk and creating the RAID arrays  
using mdadm. When I now ran the "Detect disks" step in the installer, the  
correct RAID arrays came up and I finished the installation. Now, booting  
was no problem and the server seems to behave like normal.

My question is; it this a known bug or is it my combination of hardware  
which didn't agree with the ubuntu installer?

This was during the installation of Ubuntu 10.04.1 Server amd64.



-- 
Regards,
Tor Martin Slåen