luckyy
1st June 2009, 02:28 PM
Everyone,
I had some trouble installing the F11 Preview on my home desktop, and through a lot of trial and error, figured out the problem, and fixed it. I thought I would share my experience in case anyone else runs into this issue:
I had installed two new drives into my desktop and set nvraid as raid-0 stripe (MCP51, nvidia 750i chipset)
(Now one of the drives had some from another controller in another machine... this is the key root of the problem I was having... but I didn't know it yet)
Once anaconda started up, it would show no drives at all, nothing. I assumed dmraid wasn't being run. So I ctrl-alt-F2 to a prompt and manually ran: "dmraid -a y" and it saw my raid, and started it.
I go back to anaconda, and it still doesn't see it. Turns out anaconda won't see a new device after it's started up. So that hack wasn't going to work. I reboot, disable the raid and just try to use the drives as single drives. Same deal, anaconda still doesn't see them even with the raid bios disabled. I was starting to really worry at this point.
After a LOT of playing around, I found that using: "dmraid -n" would show me the metadata block on each of my drives. Turns out, one of the drives had two metadatas on it, one from a hpt45x controller, and one from my nvidia controller. This was the cause of the problem for anaconda. Even though dmraid itself could activate the raid, anaconda could not. This was also the same reason why anaconda wouldn't use the drive in single drive mode, as it still had the metadata on it.
So I erased both drives metadata with: "dmraid -r -E" and rebooted, and recreated the raid set again in the nvidia controller bios (it was already complaining that the raid had "failed" due to my erasing the metadata block)
Once I did this, anaconda initialized the new raid just fine and I was able to proceed with a normal installation on my new raid. Grub also installed just fine, and the machine was able to boot normally after installation.
Sorry if it's long-winded, but it took me several hours to figure this all out, and hope I can save someone else from going through this if they should run into a similar situation!
I had some trouble installing the F11 Preview on my home desktop, and through a lot of trial and error, figured out the problem, and fixed it. I thought I would share my experience in case anyone else runs into this issue:
I had installed two new drives into my desktop and set nvraid as raid-0 stripe (MCP51, nvidia 750i chipset)
(Now one of the drives had some from another controller in another machine... this is the key root of the problem I was having... but I didn't know it yet)
Once anaconda started up, it would show no drives at all, nothing. I assumed dmraid wasn't being run. So I ctrl-alt-F2 to a prompt and manually ran: "dmraid -a y" and it saw my raid, and started it.
I go back to anaconda, and it still doesn't see it. Turns out anaconda won't see a new device after it's started up. So that hack wasn't going to work. I reboot, disable the raid and just try to use the drives as single drives. Same deal, anaconda still doesn't see them even with the raid bios disabled. I was starting to really worry at this point.
After a LOT of playing around, I found that using: "dmraid -n" would show me the metadata block on each of my drives. Turns out, one of the drives had two metadatas on it, one from a hpt45x controller, and one from my nvidia controller. This was the cause of the problem for anaconda. Even though dmraid itself could activate the raid, anaconda could not. This was also the same reason why anaconda wouldn't use the drive in single drive mode, as it still had the metadata on it.
So I erased both drives metadata with: "dmraid -r -E" and rebooted, and recreated the raid set again in the nvidia controller bios (it was already complaining that the raid had "failed" due to my erasing the metadata block)
Once I did this, anaconda initialized the new raid just fine and I was able to proceed with a normal installation on my new raid. Grub also installed just fine, and the machine was able to boot normally after installation.
Sorry if it's long-winded, but it took me several hours to figure this all out, and hope I can save someone else from going through this if they should run into a similar situation!
