Unable to use the "Manually partition a hard drive (fdisk)" option

[Antony John]

Binary package hint: fdisk-udeb

In the alternates cd for Hardy Heron when selecting the option "Manually partition the hard disk (fdisk)" the installer fails to load the fdisk package. It dumps the following error to console:

main-menu[3692]: INFO: Menu item 'fdisk-udeb' selected
main-menu[3692]: Warning**: Unable to set title for fdisk-udeb.
main Menu[3692]: DEBUG: resolver (libnewt0.52): package doesn't exist (ignored)
main-menu[3692]: INFO: Falling back to the package description for console-setup-udeb
main-menu[3692]: INFO: Falling back to the package description for fdisk-udeb

The reason I want to use fdisk is that my system already has a software raid setup using the Intel software raid (ICH7R) chipset. The mother board is an ASUS P5W64 WS which has Intel ICH7R support. It also has a Marvell 88SE6145 raid chipset.
 I have a WindowsXP install already on the harddisks configured as raid1 stripe set using the Intel ICH7R.

The default hard disk partitioner is failing to detect the software raid meta data on the disks. I want to enable dmraid support with fdisk

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

None of those are actually errors. Could you give me a bit more of the log, please?

In any case, you're going to have a hard time working around partman by using fdisk. The real fix to this is to get dmraid support into the installer, which we're working on.

[Antony John (antojk)]

Unfortunately I dont have the log now. And I cant repeat because the machine is a work computer. So now I am using OpenSuse on it.

I am facing this problem with the alternates Cd which is supposed to have a methodology for installing using software raid(dmraid) enabled. I have tried the manual process using chroot and the Live CD, but it is pretty long winded and error prone.

When would software raid support on installer happen?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

It sounds like this is essentially bug 22107, then. As I noted in that bug, current daily builds of Intrepid's alternate or server CDs (not the desktop CD) should include dmraid installation support; please give it a try and report back.