dmraid troubles

[Jason Montleon]

I have an Alienware M7700 laptop that is capable of doing RAID 0 with the built in SATA Promise controller, however I have it configured to run as an IDE controller so that each of the two hard drives are seen separately. With Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 Test 1 I had to use the nodmraid option when installing else the installer would hang and fail to install. Configured as it was the drives were seen as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. I had F7 installed on sda and F8 on sdb.

Now with Fedora 8 Test 2 I was able to run the installer without the nodmraid option, but when I did this and told it that I wanted to create a custom disk layout and asked it to do nothing to /dev/sda (though it saw it as /dev/mapper/pdc.... sorry don't remember the exact name for the device) and only format /dev/sdb2 (F8 root partition) it blew away my Fedora 7 install.

I played around with it some more, and to my surprise when I reran the Fedora 7 install it was able to also install without the nodmraid option and now saw the /dev/mapper/pdc... device rather than /dev/sda. However, the downside to this is that chainloading grub from /dev/sdb2 where I have F8T2 installed completely fails.

I reran both the F7 and F8T2 installs using the nodmraid option and both versions now once again see the drives as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. The grub chainloader also works and I am able to boot into both versions again. Nevertheless something strange seems to be going on with dmraid; whether the older versions, or the new version, or both to blame I can't guess.

The fact that F8T2 murdered my F7 install is not a good thing though. I use the computer purely for testing so no loss for me, but with a release version I could see people being rather furious over that...

Respectfully,
Jason