ICH9 RAID prevents installation, any ideas?
 

I have motherboard Asus P5E3 with 6 SATA ports:
/dev/sda: member of ICH9 RAID5
/dev/sdb: member of ICH9 RAID5
/dev/sdc: *TARGET DRIVE* for installation (SINGLE, not member of RAID)
/dev/sdd: member of ICH9 RAID5
/dev/sde: DVD ROM (Source)
/dev/sdf: ---

cfdisk without parameters say error. When I run "cfdisk /dev/sdc", I can manage partitions, add target partition and partition for swap... But then when I run "setup"... it could not find created partitions :(:(:(

RAID5 contains critical data, so disconnecting /dev/sda and /dev/sdb simultaneously or reordering drives (sda <--> sdc) may be dangerous... //There is an option in BIOS in AHCI mode to software switch off SATA ports, but it seems it affects only BIOS ;)

Is there any way to point setup to /dev/sdc immediately?

Did you remember to write the partitions to the disk ? If cfdisk sees the drive then the drive should be seen by setup as well. I usually put SATA drive in AHCI mode to avoid possible driver issues.

Yes, of course I write partitions before quit cfdisk :)
But it seems that setup try access /dev/sda at the first anyway...

...or it does not, not really sure.

There was one strange thing:
if I use cfdisk, everything is OK,
but if I use fdisk (partitions type 82 and 83 are already created, I just enter 'p' and then 'w' commands), it always says that the partitions are written but could not be read again, and the changes will affect to setup after system restart.

Oh yeah, sometimes I have to restart after partitioning otherwise it won't see the partitions, so you can try that, but I bet you did.

Yes I did and partitions are accessible for kernel so it's trouble with setup program only.
It's surprising that Slackware setup contains rather poor help.
There is the paragraph about activating swap before run setup (mkswap, swapon) - swap is activating with no errors, but ADDSWAP still could not find it (I think because setup firstly try access /dev/sda and fail).

So /dev/sda,sdb broken, how to install to /dev/sdc?
 

So, I have ICH9 RAID, BUT I DO NOT WANT TO USE IT WITH SLACKWARE. I also don't want to migrate or backup it somewhere or reconfigure because it contains critical data. I need to install Slackware to /dev/sdc that is a single hard drive, not a member of RAID5 (but /dev/sda,sdb and sdd are members).

Symptoms:
1) cfdisk without parameters say error: partition ends after the end of disk or something like (it's about /dev/sda as default);
2) setup program could not find partitions with type 82 and 83 prepeared with `cfdisk /dev/sdc': /dev/sdc5 and /dev/sdc6 (setup is also scan firstly /dev/sda and I need a way to prevent it).

I need a way to tell setup program to use /dev/sdc immediately, without making scan that in always fails due to unsupport intel matrix storage by kernel.

There is I posted before in top level forum wrongly: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-ideas-727828/

I wonder if you try to boot using the boot options 'sda=noprobe sdb=noprobe sdd=noprobe', so at the boot prompt try:

@kay27: threads merged. Please don't open new threads on the same subject.

unSpawn, thank you.
H_TeXMeX_H, I tried, but problem partitions are still visible :( Anyway also thanx a lot. I've just started to explore setup scripts in Slackware :)

# which setup
/usr/lib/setup/setup

This is a script, not a binary. It calls /sbin/probe at first that is also a script. probe contain at the begin:
# This is 'probe', a wrapper for using fdisk to gather drive info for
# the Slackware setup scripts...

probe says 'Unable to seek on /dev/sda' and exit. That is the problem. It's here.

Analyzing script, I found that /sbin/probe use /proc/partitions that contain information about absolutely all partitions:

I tried:
and delete lines from 3 (minor 0) up to first inclustion of sdc... But 'w' command (in ed text editor) fail with: ""/proc/partitions", /proc/partitions: Input/output error". I still have no rights to write.

How I can edit this file? :)

Try unmounting all the RAID drives before running setup, if they are mounted.

If not, I think you can edit the setup script, possibly.

They are unmounted...

I tried to modify /sbin/probe so lot of time, but it seems, it *very* love to call fdisk -l everywhere :) so I find the brute force solution:

It is installing now :) I write it from cellphone.

That's so odd that you have to do that. I wonder if this should be considered a bug or something.

No, H_TeXMeX_H, that was temporary installation environment, I think that way is more simple than to totally rewrite probe and setup scripts :)

It was successfully installed... but I can't do normal boot, only single user mode... of course "due to disk errors" :)
No kernel patch for matrix storage, no way to skip checking sda/sdb at the time of boot (?)... Don't know what to do.
Making fake raid - it was my big mistake. It's nowhere to migrate raid this time... They say ubuntu and freebsd have no such problem, maybe I'll try, but these are not the soft I want try)

It would be nice if you posted the exact error where it fails, you might be able to comment something out of /etc/rc.d/rc.M.

Right on :) I've commented line 148 of /etc/rc.d/rc.S:
It's now all right.

Thanx.

That's great. Usually it shouldn't be this difficult to install, but this may be a special case, or a bug ...

I don't know if this is still a problem, but I use ICH10 RAID and installed Slackware in the RAID partition. I modified the "sd.c" file to omit the partition checking on the first two drives.

Change this line.

To this.

The number "2" can be changed and it specifies the number of "sd" device letters to skip. As is it skips "sda" and "sdb". By using a different expression besides "index < 2" it's possible to omit some arbitrary range of letters. This is a KLUGE but was the safest way that I knew to change the code. A driver or kernel parameter to specify devices to skip for partition checking would be helpful.