Description of problem: Trying to reinstall a box I wanted to keep just the partitioning and mirroring. The automatic partitioner suggested some garbage LVM arrangement so I told it to hand edit the existing partitions. Set these up, no problem except it kept telling me about hda5. I have no hda5, but it seems anaconda invented an hda5 raid volume < 1Mb in size that it didnt even show itself on the partitions. Set up raid volumes, excluded the bogus hda5, and carried on to try and install. It then blew up trying to set up the partitions. ALT-F2 shows the last thing it logged was "reading raid sb failed for hda5" No suprise there, its a drive that was invented by Anaconda!
How did it keep telling you about hda5? What is the output of printing the partition table from within parted?
It never showed hda5 in the options you could pick but it claimed the real hda5 was hda6 (no hda5 shown) and it kept offering it as a volume when I did "create raid" The earlier partitions were fc2 created (all but lba area) 0.031 95.976 primary ext3 boot 95.977 8287.945 primary ext3 raid 8287.945 38543.882 primary swap raid 8543.882 38166.679 extended lba 8543.914 8544.867 logical raid 8544.898 38166.679 logical raid It also reports "Unable to satisfy all constraints" and "Can't have end before start"
8543.914 8544.867 logical raid is the problem -- parted at least is seeing a partition there. There are some reports that one of the ramifications of bug 138419 is some duplicate partition listing. Can you try the updates.img there which has a newer libparted and see if that acts a little bit better?
Closing due to inactivity. Please reopen if you have further information to add to this report.