Description of problem: Summary covers it pretty well. The boot/installer kernel finds the controller as it enumerates the hardware, as anything recent always has, as a Promise PDC20268 IDE controller, and also finds the two 40GB hard drives attached to it. Everything looks normal/fine, the drives are called hde and hdg as usual. However when Anaconda begins and storage is scanned to find somewhere to install to, the drives are not found. All it finds is "/dev/mapper/pdc_jeaegcfh", which it does see to be the correct size for one of the hard drives. This is *NOT* one of the Promise "fake raid" controllers, it is strictly a PCI IDE controller (and I wouldn't want to use promise fake raid anyway). I even did a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd(e|g) bs=1024 count=10' and also one calculated to write zeros to the last 100 cylinder-sized byte counts of each drive, though I don't think either of these drives have ever been used as any part of a linux software raid or a promise fake raid setup. No effect. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora Core 5 Test 3 4.92 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Put a Promise Ultra 100 TX2 (PDC 20268 chipset) PCI IDE controller in 2. Attach hard drives 3. Try to install and have the drives seen by Anaconda Actual results: All it finds is "/dev/mapper/pdc_jeaegcfh" Expected results: Should find the two IDE drives hde and hdg like the kernel itself sees when booting. Additional info:
Correction, meant to say I don't think either drive has ever been used as part of a promise fake raid, they were used for 3 software RAID1's on the FC4 box they were pulled out of.
The drives have definitely been used as a promise fake raid controller. The best thing to do here is probably to remove the metadata from the disks, but we can't really do that automatically because it is somewhat dangerous if you're not reusing the entire disk, or not all the disks in the set. You can remove them by doing: dmraid -r /dev/hde /dev/hdg -E -f pdc (the "dd" command you used doesn't work because the magic data is near the end of the disk, not the beginning) If for some reason removing the metadata isn't an option, you can boot the installer with "nodmraid" on the command line, and it'll ignore any metadata it finds.