Bug#765736: partman-base: Failure to create RAID set with Intel RST (on other disks)
Package: partman-base
Severity: normal
Tags: d-i
Dear Maintainer,
The parition manager fails to create RAID sets on disks *not* under Intel RST.
My system is a quad-core 64bit with 16G ram installing using the Jessie amd64 net-installer. The mobo is modern and supports UEFI and Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technology).
I have 4 hard disks:
sda/sdb - 500G each
sdc/sdd - 1TB each
I have two systems I have suffered this problem on - the second system had 2 x 1TB for sda/sdb and 2x250G for sdc/sdd.
In the BIOS Intel RST is enabled and a RAID 1 volume created using sda and sdb.
Windows 7.1 Pro 64 bit was installed to these Intel RST RAID set and boots using UEFI. (note: sdc/sdd must not be connected during windows install).
The intention is to install Debian onto sdc/sdd partitioned as follows.
250M - EFI Boot
750M - RAID 1 (/dev/md0) for /boot on ext4
rest of drive - RAID 1 (/dev/md1) for LVM
The text installer paritions the paritions on GPT correctly. on writing the paritions to disk and configuring the RAID everything appears normal.
2 RAID sets with the required drives are created. When finished the installer returns to the disk partioning as expected and up until this point everything seems fine (apart from drives being offered for the raid set selection which are not appropriate - its shows partitions already configured in raid sets and the Inet RST raid set (/dev/md126p).
The paritions shown in the main list do NOT show the new RAID sets. They are never created.
As a work-around going Back amd then Execute a Shell from the installer and entering the following:
mdadm --create /dev/md0 -l 1 -n 2 -x 0 /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdd2
mdadm --create /dev/md1 -l 1 -n 2 -x 0 /dev/sdc3 /dev/sdd3
creates the raid sets correctly. cat /proc/mdstat shows the raid correctly set up and due to paranoia I wait until the raid sets are shown as in sync before exiting the shell back to the installer. Going back into disk partitioning now shows the RAID arrays correctly and configuration of LVM and /dev/md0 proceeds as expected.
The resulting system boots via UEFI correctly and operates properly. (note the Intel RST RAID set is ONLY used by Win7, except for boot where the grub UEFI configuration is written into the RST RAID EFI Boot parition created by Windows 7.
The installer should create the raid sets - (mdadm manages it without problem and the installer then uses these partitions correctly).
-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
APT prefers testing-updates
APT policy: (500, 'testing-updates'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 3.13-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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