On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 3:55 PM, Bob Goodwin - Zuni, Virginia, USA <bobgoodwin@wildblue.net> wrote:

All of that looks ok except "Device Type" is always grayed out and I never get to select raid.

I'm going to guess this is because you didn't use mdadm -C to create the raid array in advance. Just making partitions isn't enough. Technically type code 0xFD is deprecated, because it only applies to mdadm metadata version 0.9 meant for kernel raid autodetect, but I don't think that's related to your problem.

Option A: Delete all of the partitions you previously created by selecting them, then clicking the minus (-) button. Then create new "mount points" using the plus (+) button, setting mount point and size in the resulting dialog, then on the right side UI change Device Type to RAID.

I made /boot ext2 and the others ext4 and /dev/sda seems happy with that but no matter what I do entries to /dev/sdb are not accepted, and as I say I can't select raid and raid 1.

This does sound like the installer has no idea that the sda and sda partitions are mdadm members.

Option B: Post the result from:

$ sudo parted /dev/sd[ab] u s p

$ mdadm -E /dev/sda[123]

$ mdadm -E /dev/sdb[123]

I'm assuming 3 partitions, if there's four then use [1234].

For what it's worth I think you're better off with /boot being formatted ext4, and if for some reason you don't want journaling you can disable it post-install with 'sudo tune2fs -o ^has_journal <dev>'

I set the disks up with fdisk but have not created any files on the assumption that the installer should do that, perhaps I am wrong?

Nope, either the installer creates the partitions+mdadm metadata (i.e. creates the raid set), or it will use an existing already created one. It won't just use already made partitions, it has no information on how to assemble them without mdadm metadata already in place. So if you didn't use mdadm -C to create each raid set you wanted, you can omit option B above.

Chris Murphy