Originally Posted by
mathog
Hmm, wait a minute, I bought a batch of these from a vendor who had found that they did not work well in a RAID. Some had been in the RAID, some had not. The first couple of Mb have been written and rewritten repeatedly, but there could still be some RAID blocks at the end of the disk.
Made a CD from the mini.iso and booted that in "command line install".
Code:
One or more drives containing MDADM containers (Intel DDF RAID) have been found. Do you wish to activate these RAID Devices? Activate MDADM containers (Intel/DDF RAID)?
Default was yes, changed it to no.
Code:
One or more drives containing serial ATA RAID configurations have been found. Do you wish to activate these RAID devices? Activate Serial ATA RAID devices?
Default was yes, changed it to no.
That wasn't good enough, got to "[!!] Partition disks" and the only option was iSCSI. The local disk wasn't shown. Used the menu system to get into the shell and wrote over the back end of the disk like this:
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs-512 seek=1953000000
back into the installer, detect disks, but it still came up empty in partition disks.
Rebooted and chose "expert command line install". This time when it got to the disk partitions it was (finally!) showing disk/partition information. Used those tools and to add partitions for Ubuntu and it now seems to be installing normally.
So I think the core problem is that once upon a time this disk was used in a RAID, some of that information remained at the end of the disk, and the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS default installer choked mightily when it saw this information - not offering the user any options to remedy it, and not showing any relevant diagnostic information.
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