All,
I was pleased that openUSE 12.1 identified my intel Matrix RAID10 disk and even more pleased that it allowed me to import the existing disk partitioning and it installed.
However. Firstly I got a warning that the bootloader was going to be installed some way off. I’m not 100% sure where the bootloader was going to be stored (i.e. at the root of my mdadm device /dev/md126 or in a partition). Since this was a warning and it always worked up to now (well, on an old installation that might have used dmraid, and with failure to shut down cleanly on Fedora 16, all the same), I pressed ahead.
At the point where it asked me to re boot, I saw a whole stream of device not found errors scrolling past on the screen. While this did not feel helpful, I pressed reset and hoped. I was disappointed, the RAID disk was not clean and there was no boot loader.
By re-installing Fedora 16 I found my Windows system again (and the old partitions were there), so all was not lost.
My question is: is openSUSE 12.1 expected to install on a RAID partition using intel Matrix RAID administered by MDADM? If so, and if the disk recovers (I had to re-install Fedora 16 on top of the non-clean RAID device and that got me back the ability to boot into Windows - yay 
) I’ll have a go at looking at the detail of the warning message. Is there a point at which I can extract details that might be useful for your debugging pleasure?
Some details: Opensuse 12.1, DVD, x86_64. Intel Matrix RAID RAID10. Also Windows install. One /boot partition and a swap partition directly on the md device, the rest (/ and others) inside a LVM logical volume formed from two partitions on the md device.
Any help appreciated
Jens
I looked at this some more. It now seems to me that the md126p3 partition was marked as active. Why, I do not know (it’s the extended partition which holds a bunch of logical partitions, but it’s not a good place).
Oh, and using Windows disk partitioning tool to mark the md126p1 partition as active led to a crash and a loss of data. The partitioning table below is what Windows put back when restoring the disk (I had to kill all data, i.e. take down the RAID and make a new one).
Anyway, this is the partitioning table. I can run again, like I said, if there is any interest. My Linux partitions are throwaway at the moment, and the Windows VERY freshly restored+updated+backedup …
[jensting@localhostDesk Documents]$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/md126
Disk /dev/md126: 2000.4 GB, 2000404086784 bytes
2 heads, 4 sectors/track, 488379904 cylinders, total 3907039232 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 65536 bytes / 131072 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000c01ef
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/md126p1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/md126p2 206848 315623423 157708288 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/md126p3 315625464 3907038848 1795706692+ 5 Extended
Partition 3 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/md126p5 315625472 525340672 104857600+ 83 Linux
/dev/md126p6 525344768 558899200 16777216+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/md126p7 575750144 1204895744 314572800+ 83 Linux
/dev/md126p8 1204899840 1238454272 16777216+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/md126p9 1238458368 3907038848 1334290240+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/md126p10 558901413 575464364 8281476 83 Linux
Partition 10 does not start on physical sector boundary.
Partition table entries are not in disk order
Best Regards
Jens