Anaconda problem with sata drives

[Paul]

Mick M. wrote:
> Hi;
>   I have an MSI K9A2 rev 1 motherboard latest BIOS, with Athlon 64x2.
> This has 4 sata connectors for "normal drives" and two for raid.
>
> I have run win Xpx64, Fedora 9/10 and now 11 on this box just fine.
>
> Right now it is running F11 on a sata drive with Xp64 under VirtualBox.
>
> OK so Newegg had a sale on Samsung sata drives so I bought 2.
> I planned to use the raid connectors and run F11 on them.
>
> I installed the drives and created a raid 1 in the BIOS.
> Then I installed F11 with updates onto it.
>
> It would not boot.
> I selected it in the BIOS as first boot, but grub wanted a BIOS disk ID.
> When the system boots the raid is not shown in the sata/ide first screen.
>
> I fought it for a long time and even re-installed.
> Finally I gave up.
> I went into the BIOS and cleared the raid so it was JBOD.
> Then I put the drives onto the "normal" sata connectors and disabled the raid sata.
>
> I was able to fdisk and format both drives just fine.
> One as data and one for F11 /boot ext3 swap / as ext4.
>
> When I try to insstall F11 it cannot see the drive,at the partioning screen.
>
> I get an OK  box:
> "An error has occurred - no valid devices were found on which to create new file systems.
> Please check your hardware for the cause of this problem"
>
> I then installed Mint linux, and F10 to the drive just fine
> F11 refuses to install.
>
> I tried "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" with no change.
>
> While the installer is hanging I can Ctl-Alt-F2 and "fdisk -l"
> It sees the drive just fine, Ctl-Alt-F^ to the installer and it dies.
>
> I have re-installed my working sata drive to post this.
> Right now I am downloading Fedoro-12 Alpha x64 to see if that will work.
>
>
> Any ideas?
>
>
>
> Standard guarantee applies - 30 feet or 30 seconds, whichever comes first.
>   
iirc the dmraid in F11, or the code in Anaconda for dmraid on F11, has 
been totally rewritten and is still pretty flaky, especially with sata 
raid/fakeraid controllers.

Not much you can do except try the latest builds, and keep an eye out here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_status_of_open_bugs

Personally I said something impolite much too loud for my office 
environment, then went out and bought a pair of (expensive) Adaptec 
(real) RAID controllers, which work beautifully.

Cheers,



-- 


Paul Blonde
EnTel Communications Inc
Ph: 250-633-5151
TF: 866-633-2644
Fx: 250-633-2677