I did a bit more reading, and learned that md does store a signature on the drive, so I tried blanking the MBRs on both drives. For some reason, this didn't work -- but blanking the drives completely did resolve the problem. The md arrays are now detected and mounted properly, and the system boots and runs.
There must have been some latent md array configuration on those drives. I wish that the installer/partitioner could have noticed this. In particular, when it prompts me to create a partition table on a drive that doesn't seem to have one, could it check for any drive-level md signatures and remove them? I should also mention that during installation, I got a couple of "The device is already open" error messages, after configuring software RAID, while starting the partitioner the second time. I'll attach a gzipped copy of /var/log/installer/syslog The grub configuration is still wrong, as noted yesterday: I have to change "root (hd0,0)" to "root (hd0,1)". I would guess that the grub package is to blame for this? Let me know if you need any further info here, or if you want me to do another test. -- graham
syslog.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data
