Dear All,
This post to leave a trace of a strange behaviour I have noted when installing 12.3 as a new install (keeping /home) over an existing 11.4 install. I found the workaround but it appears it is clearly an anomaly in the installation program when dealing with RAID that could be corrected in future releases.
The situation is that I have 3 disks : one for the system (sdc) and the other two operating in RAID 1 (Linux software RAID) for the data (sda and sdb) . Each of the two disks used for data has two partitions (respectively sda1 and sda2, sdb1 and sdb2).
Under 11.4 I had a perfectly working 2 RAID partitions with md0 being composed of sda1 and sdb1 and md1 composed of sda2 and sdb2. My /home was mounted on md0
When installing 12.3 I have chosen import partition definition. At this stage the names given to the two RAID partitions were not anymore md0 and md1 but md126 and md127. It was not possible to modify them manually unless I formatted them again which I wanted to avoid. I therefore launched the installation like this. The installation when without problem but the system them could not launch and I was getting to the rescue mode. A systemctl -b showed that the problem was that the system tried to mount the /home to /dev/md126 but was failing to do so.
When investigating, it was clear through dmesg and also checking the mdadm.conf file that the RAID system was effectively assembling the right sda/sdb in md0 and md1 but that the fstab was referring to md126 and md127.It was therefore unable to mount the /home partition.
After editing by hand the fstab to change the md126 and md127 to md0 and md1, the system booted perfectly.
I hope this can help others. Even though I am using opensuse for about 2 year, I have just registered with the community so if this information is not at the right place (should it be reported as a bug ?), please guide me on where to put it.
Regards
Philippe