Install Does Not Recognize RAID1

Ask Fedora
1

I am in the midst of trying to upgrade to F32 from SLED 15 (Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop). I have /home on a RAID1 set of partitions across two physical drives.

Andaconda does not like the RAID1 I have, because I am not telling it to format it. But I need it to be picked up during the install. This is where a single topic/issue becomes a multiple topic problem.

I went ahead and did the install w/o the RAID1 /home area. But to create a userid causes /home to be created. When I went into fstab and changed it… well, then the reboot that followed, root couldn’t login.

So I had to restore the SLED 15… This was so I could copy all of the info in its fstab to edit the F32 fstab.

Surely there is an easier way. And why wouldn’t there be a way to tell the user manager to NOT create a /home entry (because I’m afraid it will erase everything there). Yes I do have /home backed up, but it took backup software a while to backup somthing over 250GB even using a USB 3 device.

I am looking forward to getting this all to run. But this is getting a little difficult… :slight_smile:

2

Did you assemble the array with mdadm before starting Anaconda? If yes, then you should be able to choose the /dev/md* device as installation target.

Well, you can’t have a homeless user. What exactly did you change in /etc/fstab? By the way, are you aware of the Discoverable Partition Specification?

I haven’t used the graphical installer in quite a while, but I remember that when you have selected a physical partition that’s already formatted, you have the option to specify the mount point without reformatting it.

3

Thank you very much for answering this. I am running between things I have to do today and fixing this computer is a lower priority until about 5PM local for me… :slight_smile:

“Did you assemble the array with mdadm before starting Anaconda? If yes, then you should be able to choose the /dev/md* device as installation target.”

Yes, it was done under SLED. But I do not see how to do this when doing an initial install of Fedora.

" Well, you can’t have a homeless user. What exactly did you change in /etc/fstab? By the way, are you aware of the Discoverable Partition Specification "

I had no idea (the Discoverable Partition Specification) that this existed. And under OPENSuse (in days gone by), one could specify a user ID but tell the system to NOT build the /home entry (because it already existed). In this way one could build everything but the /home because it was already in existence from a prior Linux install. So all one needed to do at that point is define the users, set their passwords, and they were ready to run because all their data was already in place.

fstab: I changed that in SLED to get it to pick it back up (SLED got damaged somehow in the install – seems they were having problems with repositories last night – seems I hit this when doing maint on weekends). And I am answering using an older SLED 12 image (lost my SLED 15 DVD, just reburned it).

Now back to the mount point: Anaconda does not (that I could find) allow me to tell it to pickup the RAID1 partitions (even though it recognized them and knew which was “primary”…) unless I told it to reformat. This, in my opinion, is a design flaw. If one can effectively do an upgrade from one Linux to another…

The possible catch in this is the ID numbering, which I think Suse starts with 1000… The other is going to be the group definitions, but that is a different problem that must be resolved by the “accidental administrator” (me). I have been a user of LInux desktops since about 2002, but I am not a Linux power user. Just know enough to be ugly dangerous (thankfully my day job has to do with Mainframes where I have been a systems programmer (super admin), and internals software developer. So I have some idea of what an O/S needs for I/O definitions since I work with z/OS, zVM, and zVSE).

4

Soooo, you didn’t actually assemble the array…
Before you start the installation, open a terminal and run the commands to bring the array online, read my reply to your other post.

When you have it up and running, see if the standard or the advanced partitioning tool allows you to specify a mount point for /dev/md* without reformatting it.

It’s the same in Fedora.

5

OK, Not sure where we were here. I’ve had some stuff I’ve had to do…

So to get a level-set, I re-installed SLED 15 SP1. And it got the RAID1 up and happy.

So then I went back and started over with F32. It figure it all out this time, and accepted the RAID1 (without me having to do bunch, because apparently it recognized the SLED install since it listed it). So I got it all to install and updated and finally got KUSER installed.

With that I was able to set my same user ID and it recognized the /home being on the raid1 set and things are progressing. I have a different problem now. But that is for another thread.

PS. Yes, getting the md?? was an issue. Somehow it had become md127, and in setting up the re-install of SLED 15 SP1, I got it back to, I think it is now MD0. In any case it is working for both SLED 15 and F32.

6

I don’t know how the installer works in Fedora, but in general, some installers auto-assemble arrays when the partition type is set to 0xFD, others when it’s 0xDA. Assembling the array yourself from the installation environment, but before launching the actual installer bypasses the issue.

Sets can have different names defined in each mdadm.conf, so if you are dual-booting, it could be md1 in Fedora and md2000 in SLED, it’s not important.