Software Raid Setup with feisty herd1 alternate on amd64

[Michael Flaig]

Binary package hint: partman-md

Setting up Software Raid with the feisty herd1 installer fails. I tried setting it up from scratch, created partitions on each disk, started the software raid setup, set the 2 partitions as members in a raid1. After creating the md0 the installer complains that it does not work, but I can see the raid md0 got created and started correctly. Some thing when creating the raid disks with debian etch installer and trying to reuse them.

I've used the alternate-amd64 feisty herd1 ...

I cannot give you any logs at the moment, but if you cannot reproduce it please get back to me and I'll do the setup again to get the information you need.

[Miek Gieben (miek)]

Same with herd2. Create the arrays, installed grub on the 2 disks and tried to boot. Grub all goes okay, but then it doesn't detect the arrays properly and ubunut fails to boot. You get dropped in the busybox shell which is ran from the initrd image!

Now I have a boot partition without raid1 and this works, all other raid devices are detected, it is just the booting that fails.

This is with a 2-disk raid1 setup. My /etc/fstab:
proc /proc proc defaults,nosuid,noexec 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/root ext3 defaults,noauto,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/md2 /var xfs defaults 0 1
/dev/md3 /tmp xfs defaults,usrquota,grpquota 0 2
/dev/md4 /usr xfs defaults 0 2
/dev/md5 /vol xfs defaults 0 2
/dev/md6 /home xfs defaults,usrquota,grpquota 0 2
/dev/md1 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

/dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 used to raid1 too...

[harry (harald-dumdey)]

I can confirm that bug also on a new installation with alternate-cd (herd2)

[Jeff Balderson (jbalders)]

I can confirm the same with Herd3.

From my diagnosis, it appears that /dev/md? are missing or not generated properly in the initramfs.

In the busybox shell, I proceeded to do:

mknod /dev/md0 b 9 0
mknod /dev/md1 b 9 1
etc..
mdadm --run /dev/md0 /dev/hda1 /dev/hdc1
mdadm --run /dev/md1 /dev/hda5 /dev/hdc5
etc..
exit

And then it proceeded to boot properly.

I did all of that from memory, so I may not have all the commands exact.

[pdanielss (pdanielss)]

I've had the same problem. After installation, while rebooting, ubuntu complains about one of the devices /dev/md3, that was my home partition. It happens with a fresh install and also with an an upgrade install from ubuntu edgy.
I've used the amd64 alternate cd (feisty beta, last beta before final release).