Help: F11 anaconda doesn't see my hard drives

[Roberto Ragusa]

Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 15:02:04 +0200,
>   Roberto Ragusa <mail at robertoragusa.it> wrote:
>> Anaconda refused to detect the "degraded" array. 4 disk in RAID-1 is not
>> exactly degraded, I would say... :-)
>> I had to "grow" the array from 5 disks to 4.
> 
> Degraded means that all of the array elements aren't functional, not whether
> there is still redundancy.

Ok, I know that, but I suppose that the refusal to upgrade on a degraded
array would be "do not do something dangerous when the array is not really
in good conditions" and then a (debatable) assumption that 4 mirrors out
of 5 is an emergency condition.

In my opinion this limitation is completely unjustified.
RAID has as objective "the system will go on"; if an upgrade is impossible
then the system is not going on, and it's happening for no real technical
reason.

>> I have no idea if this still applies.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> In your case you could have dropped the number of elements in the array,
> did the install and then bumped it back up again. If you only had two drives

This is what I did.
I did grow the array from 5 to 4 (that is, reverse-grow).

> you wouldn't have been able to, because anaconda also has a minimum number
> of drives for each raid type. So even a complete 1 element raid 1 array
> can't be used for an install.

That is another unreasonable limitation.
For example, mdadm is a little petulant if I try to create a 1-disk RAID-1,
but it finally does it if I force it enough.

These things are really annoying, as they happen in a particularly
delicate moment, when you don't have your usual environment, you may not
have an internet connection and you are already tired because of the
slow DVD boot and other details.

> In the past I have patched anaconda to allow
> this. There have been RFEs both for allowing degraded arrays and allowing
> complete 1 element raid 1 arrays and both (well actually more since there
> are duplicates of these RFEs) have been closed won't fix.

Was there a motivation for "wontfix"?
I'm curious to listen what kind of logic has been applied.

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it