Description of problem: Old tattooing from Promise hardware raid confuses dmraid in FC5. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 1.0.0.rc9 How reproducible: On a machine which had Promise hardware RAID in use under RedHat 9, we disabled the Promise hardware raid (setting the mode to Ultra IDE instead of Promise RAID in the BIOS). We were able to install Fedora Core 4 with software RAID partitions without problems. However, when we went to upgrade the machine from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5, the installer complained about corrupted partition maps. This problem doesn't occur if I repeat the same steps with the FC4 installer. My guess is that dmraid is seeing some residual traces of the tattooing from the original Promise hardware RAID usage. The Fedora Core installer should be smart enough to detect when the Promise hardware RAID has been depreciated in favor of the software RAID. Steps to Reproduce: 1. On a machine with Promise hardware RAID support, enable it in the BIOS and install RedHat 9 with the non-free Promise RAID drivers. 2. Disable the hardware Promise RAID support and clean install Fedora Core 4 on the same drives with software RAID-1 partitions. 3. Reboot from the FC5 install CD and attempt to find the newly installed FC4 linux installation on the software RAID-1 partitions. Actual results: Anaconda reports partition map problems requiring a reformat. Expected results: I expected the FC4 md partitions to be found. Additional info:
Reassigning to anaconda, which should give the user the option to remove the unwished RAID metadata from the hard disks by running 'dmraid -rE devpath [devpath...]'.
Heinz, In the meanwhile is there a kernel option that I can pass to the installer to disable dmraid? I am having trouble figuring that out. If I can disable dmraid perhaps I could install FC5 on the problem FC4 installation. Jack
Heinz, I have found that the 'nodmraid' option does allow the md partitions on the FC4 machine, which once had hardware raid, to be seen by the FC5 installer. Interestingly, a second machine which never had hardware raid enabled has a somewhat different problem. The FC5 installer can't find the FC4 installation on its software RAID-1 partitions but doesn't report a specific error. It just says that no linux installations can be found and asks the user to format a drive. Oddly the 'nodmraid' option solves this problem as well. Using that option the existing FC4 RAID-1 md root partition is found and the installation can proceed without problems. Is this a known issue that some configurations which have never had hardware raid can still confuse dmraid? Jack
I should note that this problem may effect other uses of software raid as well with FC5. I had attempted to convert a machine running FC5 to a degraded software RAID-1 using the protocol described at... https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2006-March/msg04350.html https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2006-March/msg04963.html I strongly suspect now that FC5 would had recognized these degraded RAID-1 md partitions that I created had I known to disable dmraid with the 'nodmraid' kernel option. Unfortunately I don't have that machine available to test this on but I suspect it to be true.
Fedora apologizes that these issues have not been resolved yet. We're sorry it's taken so long for your bug to be properly triaged and acted on. We appreciate the time you took to report this issue and want to make sure no important bugs slip through the cracks. If you're currently running a version of Fedora Core between 1 and 6, please note that Fedora no longer maintains these releases. We strongly encourage you to upgrade to a current Fedora release. In order to refocus our efforts as a project we are flagging all of the open bugs for releases which are no longer maintained and closing them. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle/EOL If this bug is still open against Fedora Core 1 through 6, thirty days from now, it will be closed 'WONTFIX'. If you can reporduce this bug in the latest Fedora version, please change to the respective version. If you are unable to do this, please add a comment to this bug requesting the change. Thanks for your help, and we apologize again that we haven't handled these issues to this point. The process we are following is outlined here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/F9CleanUp We will be following the process here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping to ensure this doesn't happen again. And if you'd like to join the bug triage team to help make things better, check out http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers
There is a bug where the dmraid stuff just blocks. This bug has not been solved yet and we are still working to fix it. However there is a work around. If you use nodmraid, the installer will ignore/skip the dmraid stuff allowing the install to finish. This is a workaround and does not fix the problem. There is a long list of bugs that are filed against this problem. This bug is one of them. We have decided to close all the related nodmraid bugs and leave just one open that will represent all of the others. So this bug will be duped for this reason. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 409931 ***