I have 10 or 11 pages of notes from my attempts to install 8.0 with software RAID. It took me a total of 6 installation attempts to get the install to work just right. I've noted the following problems with anaconda:
1. Spontaneous crashes. A few times while I was sitting in the Disk Druid panel the screen went black, the installer stopped and I'd get a message that it was safe to reboot the computer. Based on looking at the virtual consoles I get the impression, unproven, that when anaconda attempts to read the partition table of a drive and has problems with this it will abort the installation without warning.
2. Bad block checks that cause crashes. When you specify checking for bad blocks, anaconda will abort the entire installation with no option. You get a short, nasty message saying a problem was detected, it is a serious problem, and the installation can't continue. It doesn't tell you what the problem is, specifically, and neither do the virtual consoles. I think the code that checks for bad blocks has bugs in it. To begin with, I strongly question whether a brand new drive is likely to have bad blocks. I'm not sure what the code considers a bad block to be. The error messages should be much more specific so that the user has an idea of what the heck the issue is. And I don't think anaconda gracefully handles situations where there really is a bad block. It should try hard to recover the problem; after all a bad block can be worked around without crashing.
I had 4 or 5 crashes because the installer claimed /dev/hdc had bad blocks. When I didn't check for bad blocks, the installation started working. Anaconda would just format the drive and go on installing packages.
After crashing on a bad block -- I have no way to replay the installation again and possibly made changes to my installation. Instead I have to go through every anaconda screen again and re-enter my options. This stinks. It's for bonehead software to make the user do that again and again. A far smarter, time saving approach is to let a user replay the previous installation with the option of making changes.
3. Creating software RAID partitions is an error prone process. Disk Druid seems to have problems creating both partitions and RAID devices. It will often give you error messages at illogical times or in illogical situations that it can't allocate a particular partition. There are a lot of rough edges here.
I'll start checking Bugzilla tonight now that I have a simple RAID 1 set up going and file bugs as I think are needed.
Thanks
Robert L. Cochran
