unable to install 13.10 on Intel RAID0 volume

[Adam Thompson]

Dell Precision T5400, all firmware up-to-date.
2 x 250GB HDDs, combined into a single RAID0 (striped) volume using Intel onboard RAID.
(Note: the same system works fine if I attempt to install *without* the Intel RAID volume configured.)

Ubiquity gets very confused with the /dev/mapper entries when doing manual partitioning, usually - but not always! - displaying bogus p0/p1/p2/p5 entries.
Doesn't matter if the disks are zeroed beforehand or not, same results.
Regardless of which partitioning option is chosen (automatic, encrypt, lvm, manual) the installer advances to the tzsetup screen but displays a modal dialog box titled (literally) "??? ???" with the text "??? ???" in it, and the dialog cannot be dismissed.

Log files attached, syslog is longer and represents a full boot into the livecd environment and multiple ubiquity runs, the ubiquity logfiles and partman logfiles are from a single, minimal run that exhibits the problem.

[Adam Thompson (athompso)]

I'd rank this problem as "critical", since it utterly prevents me from reinstalling Ubuntu on my primary workstation. There is no known workaround (yet).
I have tried pre-partitioning the disk and pre-formatting the partitions, that didn't make any difference. (In fact, ubiquity insists it's going to reformat them all anyway.)

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

At the moment, ubiquity & debian-installer do not support Intel Raid volumes as best as they could. Full support for Intel Raid via mdadm is planned.

RAID0 does not provide any data-redundancy. To fully utilise both hard-disks, you can consider an option of deconfiguring raid and installing onto single drive with "LVM" option ticked. After the installation is complete you can add the second drive to the VolumeGroup and resize logical volume & root filesystem to take up space across both hard-drives (full 500GB).

[Adam Thompson (athompso)]

That doesn't help me, as I need striping for speed, not reliability.
I see mdadm isn't present on the 13.10 live CD either, this completely crippling my efforts to do it using md inside Linux.
Back to 12.04 I go for now, at least it mostly works.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Liny (liny)]

HP Envy 17 2090nr, fakeraid isw raid0.

Yes, I have the same issue. It's even worse for me as 12.04 only works partially. I can install but it won't boot. I have to do some manual fix to GRUB2.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

What do you mean by "bogus" entries?

[Adam Thompson (athompso)]

By bogus, I mean the graphical display is referencing partitions and devices that don't/can't actually exist, and/or duplicate references to the same partition or device.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Could you be more specific? Why can't they exist? And the duplicate line is normal. It's weird, but not harmful.

[Adam Thompson (athompso)]

On 14-02-15 02:59 PM, Phillip Susi wrote:
> Could you be more specific? Why can't they exist? And the duplicate
> line is normal. It's weird, but not harmful.

Not at this time, as reproducing the problem would involve destroying my
existing, functional, 12.04 install. (Or backing up and restoring,
which sounds equally appealing to me right now.)

--
-Adam Thompson
  <email address hidden>

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

According to the logs it was using /dev/mapper/isw_bfajajcabd_Volume0p1, which is correct. The only thing out of the ordinary I see is an exception trying to write the new partition table, but the nature of the exception is not logged. Could you try manually running sudo parted /dev/mapper/isw_bfajajcabd_Volume0p1, and deleting the existing partitions?

[Mark Duncan (eattheapple)]

This bug is still present in 14.04. Unless I select the LVM option, Ubiquity will just give the ??? ???? error. Installation continues until it attempts to install grub and it failes with "Executing 'grub-install /dev/sda' failed. This is a fatal error". I chose the option to download updates during installation so that could be a grub bug.

[Mark Duncan (eattheapple)]

I should add that sometimes It will let me dismiss the error and continue and other times it can't be dismissed. I will do more testing today and post logs.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Adam Thompson (athompso)]

Really? No-one comments on a bug for 60 days and it magically stops being a bug? WTF, Canonical?

[Hongyuan Ding (hding4)]

I have the same exact problem when trying installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my Dell T3600.
I have a RAID0 on hardware RAID. Unless I choose LVM, the installation cannot continue.
The ??? ?? error will show when I try to click "install now".

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Additional information was requested and when it is not provided for 60 days, the bug is expired. If you can reproduce this, please attach your /var/log/syslog after getting this error.

[Adam Thompson (athompso)]

Fixed in Ubutun 14.10 (utopic).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]