As per the title, I cannot get past “Job dmraid-activation.service/start running”.
Any suggestions?
I did find this thread discussing the issue.
I have an HP Elitedesk 800 with no RAID.
Hello Tim and welcome to ask 
You said you have no raid, but have you gone into the bios and looked at the sata setup?
Some systems, notably, but not limited to, laptops have raid enabled in bios for the sata devices. This can result in a couple of differing results.
In one case, the fedora installer is unable to even see the drives to perform the install.
In another case, (maybe yours), fedora is unable to configure the device properly.
I would suggest that you enter the bios setup screen and check the sata device config. If it is set to RAID then switch it to AHCI and it should solve the issue. If already AHCI then this is likely not the cause.
Hi Jeff V, thanks for responding.
I checked my BIOS settings and there was nothing regarding RAID in the settings. After thinking about this a little more I wondered if it was because I had 2 SATA, 2TB drives in the computer, one of which is running Debian 11 stable. This didn’t make sense so I decided to check the 2nd drive, which DID come from a RAID set I no longer used. I reformatted the 2nd drive as EXT4 and the installation took off like nobody’s business!
Thanks again!
Missing detail - I had initially formatted the 2nd HDD as NTFS after I pulled it from the RAID array. I decided to format it as EXT4 before I had to open the computer to unplug one drive (sda - debian) and/or upgrade the firmware, which would require me install Windows on the drive first.
Again, thanks - It was a nice thought experiment that worked out.
A drive that is part of a raid array contains the raid identifier in the first part of the drive (or partition). Wiping that part out using dd and writing /dev/zero to those few sectors, then repartitioning the drive usually works well for me. Something like dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX count=1 bs=1M