IMSM RAID volume is not assembled during autoyast installation

This document (7006152) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1

Situation

An autoyast installation of SLES 11 SP1 on an IMSM (Intel Matrix Storage Manager) RAID volume fails, if the physical disks contain previously installed filesystems, partition tables, or old md metadata on the disk(s). As a consequence an md RAID array is not created and the installation is aborted.

The error message is as follows: "Error while configuring partitions, Try again".

Resolution

When using autoyast for installing SLES 11 SP1 on an IMSM RAID volume it is recommended to remove all previously created filesystems, partition tables and any previously created md metadata from the physical disks before beginning the installation. This can be done by running the following commands on all physical disk drives that will be used in an IMSM RAID array configuration:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1024k count=1 # this will remove partition table and filesystems
mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sdx # this will remove md RAID metadata

where x (in /dev/sdx) is the device being cleaned, i.e. /dev/sda.

Important note: Before running the commands, ensure the disks do not contain needed data. All data on the disks will be lost!

Disclaimer

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