Hi everybody, after a few smooth installations I am stuck with pacman.
First I created partitions with GPT, then built mirrored RAIDS with mdadm. It complained because of persisting superblocks - I run --zero-superblocks. I erased and created GPT partition-tables and changed the formatting, used disk-eraser. It built the RAIDS, but warning that there were still rests of the old superblocks. I started the Arch installer 64 bit, reformatted the partitions, rebuilt all raids ok with new superblocks, established internet connection. But pacman is unable to find any database, it searched all servers and timed out everywhere. In the mirrorlist I put nearest server up and left the others untouched. Any suggestions what I did wrong ? dmesg : cant find squashfs superblock, cant find ext4 fs - HD spinning loudly, I had to shutdown. Thanks !

How old is your install disk? Do you have repo [core] [extra] [community] enabled?

Maybe the wiki will help
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_Guide
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/RAID
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman

Hello teckk, thanks for your reply. The CD is 2 weeks old ( but I have not checked the Md5), I have installed Arch on 4 PC with it. I verified the repositories file and additionally uncommented multilib. But I suspect that my raid is at fault :
Both velociraptor 300 GB disks were spinning rapidly when I rebooted, so I was worried and stopped all raids, removed them and tried to --zero-superblock.
I zapped both disks with disk eraser, then :
OK; writing new GUID partition table (GPT) to /dev/sda, then /dev/sdb.
The operation has completed successfully.
root@PartedMagic:~# mdadm --examine
mdadm: No devices to examine
root@PartedMagic:~# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
mdadm: /dev/sda1 appears to contain an ext2fs file system
size=5120000K mtime=Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970
mdadm: Note: this array has metadata at the start and
may not be suitable as a boot device. If you plan to
store '/boot' on this device please ensure that
your boot-loader understands md/v1.x metadata, or use
--metadata=0.90
what is md/v1.x and how do I make a clean wipe of the HDD ? Thanks again...

So I reformatted the two velociraptor, rebuilt two RAIDs md0 (on sda1 and sdb1)=root and md1 (on sda3 and sdb3)=home. swap and bios boot partition are not raided. Installation of archlinux ( md0, md1 mounted and reformatted with ext4) went well until : pacstrap /mnt base. -> creating istall root to /mnt -> installing packages to /mnt. warning : database file for core does not exist. error: failed retreiving file core.db from mirror resolvinĝ timed out. Same error for every arch server. ping shows working internet connection. /etc/pacman.conf is present with core etc uncommented. mirrorlist is there. Does anyone have an idea what is wrong ?