install time inclusion of dmraid.

[Walt Corey]

This appears to be an outstanding bug reported against Ubuntu for several years. There is no reason the install time honoring of Intel motherboard raid should not be part of the Ubuntu install, as it is with Fedora, OpenSuse, and Windows. I am converting this question to a bug as 1) it has been requested at least since the spring of 2006, the alternatives, don't use raid or perform a protracted post install procedure that may or may not work and may or may not render the machine unbootable, are unacceptable.

Hi,
    I've been wrestling with this problem for some time, in the beta of 8.04 as well as GA.

I recently purchased a Dell XPS 720 with two 250GB SATA drives. This was preconfigured with Vista. After blowing away Vista I tried to load U7.10 (64) which wouldn't even boot. I ultimately installed Fedora 8 (64) which booted, installed, and ran .... well it ran like Fedora. This was during the Alpha testing of 8.04. Since Fedora has always required more love and attention then I wanted to give an OS I installed U8.04 (64) when it went beta. I installed from the alternate disk and muddled my way through which drive I wanted to install on. Fedora didn't ask me that, it just installed, spanned both volumes and presented me with 465+GB between the two volumes. I would really like to use 8.04 though so I went though the install process. However, when I booted after the install I could only get Grub error 2. Eventually I disabled RAID on both volumes in the BIOS and I could then boot 8.04 beta.

I've done a lot of research on this and essentially it seems the general answer is effectively, "don't use it, manually configure dmraid post install instead". Dmraid appears to require a lot of configuration through 8.04 and while it may be that dmraid is better, faster, later, greater, or...it may be that that the bios version is better. What's more is Windows and other Linux distros, my first hand experience is with Fedora, and I heard OpenSuse, honor the bios setting.

So my question is really a two-parter.

Could someone explain why Ubuntu doesn't / can't honor the bios raid, while others can and, either

When it will ,
How to get it to, or
If and why it never will.

As I said earlier, I would prefer to stay with Ubuntu, I think it's more stable than Fedora for those whose hobby doesn't include the care and feeding of a Linux distro.

Thanks,

Walt

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. As you observe, it has already been reported, namely as bug 22107. I'm marking this as a duplicate.

As I noted in that bug, current daily builds of Intrepid should have dmraid support. Please try this and report back.