Bug 328038

Summary:	partitioner confused by device mapper
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.3	Reporter:	Felix Miata <mrmazda>
Component:	Installation	Assignee:	Thomas Fehr <fehr>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:	Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	aj, hare
Version:	RC 1
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	y2logs.tgz

Description Felix Miata 2007-09-25 01:06:20 UTC

Created attachment 174489 [details]
y2logs.tgz

I tried to test factory rc2 mirror state as described in https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=218122#c18. When I reached custom partitioning, instead of the 29 partitions on PATA disk 1, only two items were listed: /dev/sda used by RAID hpt37x_ccedfbhiib, and /dev/mapper/hpt37x_ccedfbhiib. The i845G system has neither hpt raid nor sata.

Comment 1 Felix Miata 2007-09-25 03:51:53 UTC

I tried again except adding hwprobe=-modules-pata to cmdline and got the same behavior. It doesn't happen if I use the RC1 KDE CD instead.

Comment 2 Hannes Reinecke 2007-09-26 13:04:40 UTC

Looks like an issue with the partitioner.

Comment 3 Thomas Fehr 2007-09-26 13:19:15 UTC

dmraid detects a dmraid array on /dev/sda:

# dmraid -s -c -c -c
hpt37x_ccedfbhiib:156301440:128:mirror:ok:0:1:0
/dev/sda:hpt37x:hpt37x_ccedfbhiib:mirror:ok:156301477:10
#

Therefore the dmraid device hpt37x_ccedfbhiib is detected.
If this is not valid, you can select the entry for /dev/mapper/hpt37x_ccedfbhiib
and select "delete" in expert partitioner. Alternatively you can use the command
"dmraid -E -r /dev/sda" to remove the dmraid metadata from the disk and restart
installation. 
The raid detection by dmraid is purely based on metadata parsing on disk 
(since linux has no access to BIOS functionality) so a mis-detection cannot 
be easily prevented. If you current controller does not support BIOS RAID 
capabilty, it seems the disk in your system was part of such a RAID sometime 
in the past in another machine.

Comment 4 Felix Miata 2007-09-26 16:49:51 UTC

(In reply to comment #3 from Thomas Fehr)

> The raid detection by dmraid is purely based on metadata parsing on disk 
> (since linux has no access to BIOS functionality) so a mis-detection cannot 
> be easily prevented. If you current controller does not support BIOS RAID 
> capabilty, it seems the disk in your system was part of such a RAID sometime 
> in the past in another machine.

Is this saying that the installer at this stage has no way to tell that there is no installed hpt37x hardware? It seems to me it ought to be smart enough to find out, and if finding none, not only ignore any dmraid data it finds, but not look for any in the first place. If it might be possible, but just doesn't now, then this should amount to a request to add the feature to 11.0.