Hello,

I have been attempting to install Slackware 13.37 for days now. I am able to successfully install it onto a single drive, but this is not the configuration I want. I want to use both 160 GB drives in a RAID level 1. I create the RAID before loading the DVD iso. I see that /dev/md126 and /dev/md127 are successfully started. I partition /dev/sda with around 155 GB for the / partition and 4096 MB for the swap partition. I write the partition scheme to the partition table, then I mimic the table on /dev/sdb with:

sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk -f /dev/sdb

Then I run setup, and it successfully finds the swap partition as /dev/md126p2. I associate /dev/md126p1 with the / partition. Then I begin installing the software... but it is not really installing. The installer runs through the software packages to install, but the hard drive light never blinks once. It goes through the install process until it gets to "Qt (a multi-platform C++ graphical user interface tooklit)"; once it reaches this point it just hangs. Sometimes the word "killed" will appear at the bottom of the screen several times.

Does anyone know what I am doing wrong? I also looked into using Slackware for the RAID, but I have been unsuccessful at that, as well. I followed the RAID howto, but it says my /dev/sda and /dev/sdb devices are not suitable for RAID devices.

I would appreciate any help. I am somewhat clueless at this point.

Thank you.

Do you have the drives set for RAID or AHCI in the BIOS? The mdadm package that ships with the default install of 13.37 is missing the components to operate properly with Intel Matrix RAID (drives set as RAID in BIOS). You should be able to set up the software RAID fine with it set to AHCI.

You have four options:

1) Configure the drives for AHCI rather than RAID in BIOS
2) Build an updated mdadm package for 13.37
3) Try using -current (I don't know if this is fixed in the -current branch)
4) Drop back to 13.1 which does work properly with Intel Matrix RAID

I had the same problem but as I have a Windows RAID 1 array on the same controller dropping back to AHCI in BIOS wasn't an option so I'm using 13.1 until I either find the time and inclinaton to build a new mdadm or it gets fixed in the distro itself. (Or I move Slack and Windows onto separate machines.)

Note that you may have to zero out the first sector of the drives before starting over as the RAID controller inserts some data at the start of the drive in RAID mode.

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