Re: debian-installer: Guided partitioning breaks PERC2 Raid controllers
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 8:44 AM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
<hmh@debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Sep 2011, trouble daemon wrote:
>> So it would seem that the installers guided partitions are creating
>> broken partition tables that seem to mess with certain RAID
>
> No, it is creating perfectly fine LBA partition tables that are aligned to
> 1MiB boundaries.
Then why was fdisk -l showing me that the boot volume the installer
created as being not aligned properly, and that went away after I
manually created it on tty2 with fdisk and popped back to tty1 and
continued to the partition step and used the existing partition
layout?
>> controllers (google to get an idea of just how many). I should also
>> note that I have a near identical machine with a similar RAID card
>> (shows as AMI instead of LSI iirc), but this other card which is using
>> an identical raid setup, doesn't seem to have a problem with the
>> partitioning, yet the PERC2 one does. Very hit an miss I guess.
>
> Contact Dell and demand a PERC2 firmware update: it is their crap firmware
> which is doing something it shouldn't.
Well true, I agree that the firmware is old and has problems in that
it could more gracefully handle such a situation, but if the table was
being aligned the same way it does when I manually fdisk it, I don't
think this would be a problem. In fact, I don't think this was ever a
problem in the last 10 years I have had it running debian until
recently.
> It is possible that one of the advanced configuration options of the PERC2
> can instruct it to stop bothering with the MBR, you'll have to test.
Ya, don't recall any option like that unfortunately. Thanks for the
advice though.
> Alternatively, you can partition manually directly from the CLI or a live-cd
> to get something the PERC2 can tolerate.
Ya, this is what I did end up doing actually (although I partitioned
in CLI on installer not live-cd, but same thing no doubt), which is
why I can't understand what it is about the installer that changed.
>> Anyways, I hope this gets the attention of some of the installer gurus
>> out there and possibly point me in the right direction so that this
>> can be resolved properly. Keep up the great work! \m/
>
> It might be useful to have a "legacy dos-compatible MBR" option on the
> expert mode, indeed.
Ah, interesting option. Ya, something like that would definetly be
nice. So if I understand this right then, it's because when I fdisk,
it uses a dos compatible MBR? Then what in the world is partman (right
name for sub app?) using? Seemed like it was standard MBR last I
looked at fdisk -l, and only differed in that only sda1 was out of
alignement.
Anyways, I appreciate the reply and some of the insight. Look forward
to hearing back from you. Thanks!
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