Hi,
i’m doing several tests installation with opensuse 12.3 RC1 trying to figure out the best procedure to have /boot partition on a raid device (you can see my post here for details about the bootloader issue i have encountered) during which i discovered an unpredictable behavior of the yast installer when disks are already formatted and with some raid and lvm volume already configured.
Basically when the installation dvd boots it scans all disks and activates all raid and lvm volumes it is able to find and show them on the partitioner. Sometimes (i was not able to guess exactly when this happens) one of the raid volumes is recognized as it was a phisical disks so the partitioner does not allow you to delete or modify it. Sometimes, when you configure the partitioner for removing or modifying a raid/lvm volume, the installation stops with various errors due to the fact that the raid or the lvm volume was already in use and can’t be deleted.
The only way i found to complete an installation with both raid and lvm is to start with zeroed disks and use only the graphical partitioner to configure disks, raid and lvm.
I think the yast installer should be able to manage a partially partitioned system.
Any similar experiences ?