I haven't recently been following d-i development, but had to rebuild a system over the weekend. I used a daily-built netinst and found what I would categorize as a regression in the installer from the etch release.
I have two drives on which I had manually created two md-raid devices (/dev/md0 and /dev/md1). During the (manual) partitioning phase of the installer, I select to configure software RAID and let it do the modprobe and starting of the arrays. This appears to work, since both pre-existing arrays are started, synced and healthy. partman re-inits and displays the main screen as expected. The problem, however, is that any further action which involves the md-drives claims that "The partition tables of the following devices are changed: RAID1 device #1". A quick way to reproduce this is to run the "Setup software RAID" step twice successively (should really be idempotent, but isn't). If I wipe the swraid superblocks and create the md-raid drives from within the installer, however, things work as expected. This (along with comments from bug #37791) seems to indicate that a flag is not being set properly during the initial scan and starting of existing drives, but letting partman create the devices sets the flag(s) properly. This becomes a blocker if, as in my case, I put LVM on top of the resulting md devices and wish to have multiple root installations and a shared data drive - I want to run d-i multiple times for multiple root installs but am unable to (cleanly) do so since I need to recreate the underlying md device each time. I looked for references relating to this issue, but couldn't find any short of bug 377391 which appears related, but claims resolved in July of 2006. Perhaps it is only partially resolved? (I'm not familiar with the partman internals). Where (presumably under /var/lib/partman/) do I look for and/or change the relevant flags if that is indeed the/an issue? As a reference, I tested the same procedure with the following installation media, all of which failed which indicates that it is a problem that is not brand new: Debian netinst (19Oct07 and 28Dec07), Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 alpha2. The expected behavior *was* obtained with the etch (4.0r1) KDE CD. Thanks, and I'm more than willing to provide further information to help resolve the issue. I would assume that partman-md would be the packages against which to file a bug, but would like to verify that first. Joel Johnson P.S. The partition structure is as follows (not exact, but the general idea): drive 1: partition1 (raid autodetect) partition3 (raid autodetect) partition4 (LVM) drive 2: partition1 (raid autodetect) partition3 (raid autodetect) partitions3 are combined into a small md0 for /boot, partitions1 are combined into a large md1 for data and root volumes, and partition4 uses the extra space of drive1. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
