From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Description of problem: I have a Redhat 7.2 server using software RAID. When I run the RH9 installation by booting from either floppy or CD it doesn't detect the RAID devices. The kernel seems to know that they're there but doesn't mount them. When the install starts it tells me that no valid installation devices w detected and asks me to select one of the /dev/hd* partitions. I tried using the Update Disk suggested in Bug 65192 (this was for RH7.3) but got many anaconda errors and the installation halted. I also posted a comment on Bug 89863 as this issues seems very similar to the problem I'm having. This Bug hasn't been addressed in some time so I don't know if a resolution was reached or not. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot RH9 install from floppy. 2. Type "linux text" 3. Select "FTP" as the installation media. Actual Results: When the installation initializes it will indicate that there are no valid installation devices and prompt me to select one--the options I have are the /dev/hd* devices that comprise the RAID arrays. It doesn't, however, give me an option to select any of the /dev/md* devices. Expected Results: Anaconda should detect and mount the RAID devices and proceed with the installation/upgrade. Additional info: Since I haven't had many problems with Redhat's installation routine I'm not real familiar with troubleshooting it. Please let me know if there's any additional information I can provide about the install, log files, or whatnot so I can do so.
This issue has been worked around. The problem is that the floppy boot disk doesn't properly mount the RAID partitions. Further, since I have four IDE drives in each server, I had to install, in this case, a SCSI CD-ROM in order to upgrade. If I tried removing one of the drive and running the upgrade with a degraded RAID array it wouldn't work--Anaconda couldn't mount the degraded array. Is there a way to work around the floppy problem while still running the setup from a floppy boot disk? As I perceive it, the floppy simply doesn't have enough space to load such utilities as raidstart and therefore can't mount RAID partitions. If this is the case, can a multi-disk floppy-based install disk be created to load some of the essentials for mounting RAID and LVM partitions, for example.
There's no way for us to fit everything we use for RAID and LVM initialization and detection on floppies. Hard drive installs can only be supported from actual physical disks.