Bug 445985

Created attachment 305044 [details]
Fdisk taken under the installed Beta

I tried moving the IDE interface card to a different PCI slot, but that didn't
help.  However, I was able to get the chip IDs.  The two cards have:
 - Promise PDC2067 (HDs are recognized at install time)
 - SILO68OACL144 (HDs are recognized after installation, but not at install time)

Can you get the output of /tmp/syslog and lshal when the installer is running?

I'm sure I can if you give me instructions.  I assume I need to break into the
installer and copy those files to a Flash drive?  However, I don't know how to
get to a shell from the installer.

ctrl-alt-f2 will drop you to a shell once you're in the graphical installer.

Created attachment 305314 [details]
Output from lshal + /tmp/syslog

I have attached the output from lshal and /tmp/syslog.

Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA.
More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

The problem appears NOT to be that the installer doesn't support one of my drive
interfaces, but rather that it doesn't like something about the drive itself. 
It shows a mapped drive of 200GB (the size of my drives); I don't understand why
it does that.  However, seeing that gave me the idea to format the drives and
see if that fixed the problem.  I booted from a Fedora 9 Live USB drive, ran
mkfs on each drive in turn, and on two of them (sdc1 and sde1) it said 'This
drive appears to be in use' and refused to format it.  All of the others
formatted just fine.  I removed what I believed to be sdc1 from the system;
after I did that I was able to format all of the remaining drives.  I will try
installing again and see if it now sees four 200GB drives rather than three.

Could the installer think that I have mirrored two of the drives?  That would
give me one 200GB 'mapper' drive, and only three remaining 200GB drives. 
However, these drives have never been mirrored.  Three of them were once a
single LV, but never part of an mdadm mirror.

Yes, with sdc removed and the other drives (including sde1 which was 'in use'
yesterday) reformatted, the installer sees four 200GB drives as it should.  The
next step is to reinstall sdc and see if the installer then sees all five drives.

If you need more information please let me know ASAP; I don't want my attempts
to diagnose and fix the problem to destroy the evidence you need.

With sdc1 reinstalled I get no joy - four drives (the two SATA drives plus one
of the 190780 MB IDE drives, plus a 190780 MB device-mapper drive.

What other tests would you like me to run?

I finally figured out what is going wrong and how to work around it, although I
still have no clue why.  Anaconda thinks two of my drives are a single drive,
reachable via a multipath controller.  My humble server has never had a
multipath controller!  What is even more puzzling is that the two drives
involved are a SATA and an IDE drive, and are not even the same size.

The workaround of course is to add 'nompath' as a kernel option.  (Now as soon
as the blasted repository is fixed so I no longer get 'Unable to read group
information..." I think I can actually install!)

If you need more diagnostic information to determine the root cause please let
me know.

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