Fedora 9 Install RAID Size Error

[Roger Heflin]

Tim Berryhill wrote:
> Fedora 9 install is failing on a new machine.  I suspect the problem is
> related to my RAID's.  I have two small, fast drives in a RAID 0 600GB
> array, partitioned into two drives which currently hold Vista and XP.  I
> have three large, slow drives in a RAID 5 1.4TB array, as a single
> partition currently holding ISO's of Fedora 7, 8 and 9 and not much else. 
> The RAID's are defined in the BIOS, using the Intel ICH9.  The Fedora
> installs get past the media check (DVD is fine, it says).  I select English
> and the us keyboard, and get no further response on that console.
> 
> 
> Randomly pressing keys, I realized <alt>-F4 offered me this clear statement:
> <6>sde: rw=0, want=2930284536, limit=1465149168
> <6>attempt to access beyond end of device
> 
> Then I discovered <alt>-F2 gave me a shell prompt.
> After the install "hangs," /dev includes sda, sda1, sda2, sdb, sdc, sdc1,
> sdd and sde.
> fdisk -l thinks sda is 300GB, roughly evenly divided into sda1 and sda2.
> fdisk -l thinks sdb is 300GB without a partition table.
> fdisk -l thinks sdc is 750GB with a single large partition.  The last block
> number is very similar to the "limit" on the <6>sde error message.
> fdisk -l thinks sdd is 750GB, without a partition table.
> fdisk -l thinks sde is 750GB with a single large partition.  The last block
> number is very similar to the "limit" on the <6>sde error message.
> 
> So, it seems like my small array and my large array are each twice as big as
> Fedora sees, and at least in one section of code, Fedora performs a seek to
> a block which is outside the limit Fedora saw but near the end of the
> actual array.

It seems more likely that it is seeing the underlying disks and not detecting 
the arrays at all, do those sizes match the sizes of your disks?    The 
partition table on sda looks like the partition table for the R0 array which is 
why it gets those errors (the disk is too small for the partition table for the 
R0 array), and the partition on sdc and sde may be the partition for the R5 
array, and again the partition table would be too large for the disk.

I don't know if F9 supports that Intel controller's raid or not, but currently 
it does not look like it is finding them as raid.

You may want to read up on dmraid installs as this would be a dmraid install as 
that Intel controller is a fakeraid controller I believe, and would need to be 
supported in dmraid.

> 
> How am I misleading Fedora regarding my block counts?  I would prefer not to
> let Fedora define the array (lvm) because I use several OSes (anybody want
> a copy of OS/2?), and I do not see that inserting a hardware RAID
> controller would help, so I am hoping for something like a "count all the
> blocks" switch to add on the install command.
>