After booting from the Fedora Core 5 DVD, typing "linux xfs" at the boot prompt, and choosing to upgrade an existing installation, the installation says it cannot read the 5 drives in the RAID5 set which are formatted in XFS file system. It asks me if it should initialize each of these drives ( I say no ), and after it goes through them, it says it has encounted an unrecoverable error and I get the option to click on "Debug" or "ok". Debug displays debugging information, and "ok" halts the kernel and tells me to reboot.

My RAID set is due for backup in about a week ( I backup at the beginning of each month ), and has 2TB of data, so I would rather not lose it, lol. Restoring would take forever, also. So, I unless there is another option I can give at the command line to tell the installer to ignore my RAID set, then I either initialize the drives ( losing everything ), or possible perform a new installation, and hope that it will ignore the RAID set drives then.

Any ideas on how to best resolve this situation?

Thank You,

Fortezza

Well, I have made a lot of progress since last night. My removing the /dev/md0 mount from fstab, the installation no longer halted after complaining about not being able to read the drives in my software RAID5 set.

However, the installation always failed during the package installation. Not so much fail as the system ( keyboard, mouse ) locked up, even in text mode installation.

Today, I have backed up my files from the system disk ( the original OS still boots, just it reports as being Fedora Core 5 while still running a kernel marked as FC4! ), then I used the vendors disk erase utility to wipe the drive. Now I am reinstalling FC5, and will reassemble the RAID5 set after the installation is done. If all goes well, I will have a clean system with all of my data intact.

ok, I have tried differnt media, and tried a network installation, which failed with some "rpmio_internal.h fd->magic failed" during the package installation. I have no idea what that means, but now I am reinstalling with my RAID5 set drives disconnected, to see if that helps. If not, I have a spare hard drive I can through in to see if there is a hardware problem with the drive I am installing on.

Btw, I have also tried 3 different DVD readers for the DVD installations, so I don't think it is the reader.

Well, in the end, it looks like it was a hardward problem. Luckily I had another computer ( actually a lot faster ) to replace the original with, and everything is working fine on it. The problematic one will get a new power supply and motherboard, which should fix the problem.