Mike - If you don't care about the current contents of either disk, here is one way to get rid of the error message about GUID partitions being present. Boot from a live CD with just these two hard drives attached to the system. Once booted, open up a terminal window. Use the df command to see if anything on either drive has been mounted. If so, they will appear as /dev/sda1 (or similar). No partitions may have been mounted, if there is just junk on the drives. If a partition has been mounted, use the command sudo umount /dev/sda1 (or whatever sd partitions you saw from the df command) to remove them from the df output. Use the command ls /dev/sd* to verify that the system "sees" the two drives and that they are listed as sda and sdb. (You'll want to adjust the letters below if they come up as something else.) Then, issue this command: sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 count=1024 and do it again for sdb and any partition tables on the drives will be gone. Now, you should be able to follow the installation instructions you've had. Thomas On Oct 1, 2011, at 6:40 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > I put this off for awhile and now I'm back at it. I find it extremely disheartening that every set of instructions I find anywhere fails. They all fail and this is such a simple problem. I just want to install Ubuntu 10.10 with RAID 1 on a pair of identical 2.0 TB disks. I have done it maybe 20 times and it has never once been able to boot. > > I was hoping to be able to use these instructions from B-o-B... > > > On Tue, 12 Jul 2011, Mr. B-o-B wrote: > >> Try to do the raid prep/setup outside of the Ubuntu installer first. >> >> This is how I setup software RAID 1's, and this has worked every time for me. I have to be honest I haven't done this on Ubuntu, but I did just load the latest Ubuntu live cd to check, and all the commands exist so this should work fine. I have done this >30 times on Slackware, and a handful of times on Centos & Fedora. I actually used a Slackware install disk to setup the raid's on Fedora & Centos, but this is not necessary. The Ubuntu disk will work just fine. >> >> I personally like fdisk to create my partitions, but can use cfdisk (or anything else Ubuntu might have that you like). One disk 1 (lets call it /dev/sda) Create at least two partitions (one for swap & one for /). Change the types on both partitions to "Linux RAID autodetect" type "FD". > > I couldn't get through even that part. > > The first problem is that fdisk says that I have a GUID partition and I should use GNU parted. In gparted I can delete partitions but not so much that fdisk doesn't complain about the GUID partitioning. So I need to know what I am supposed to be doing with fdisk here. Do I really want an msdos partition? How is this done? > > Unfortunately, the detailed B-o-B instructions didn't help me (though I am dying to try them) because I couldn't get past this initial step. > > Every other set of instructions I've found on the web fails at some point. With at least one of them I get all the way through, it seems like it has worked, but then I try to start the machine and it won't boot. Next I look for ways to fix that and I haven't been able to fix it. So I delete everything and start over. > > After working on this for dozens of hours I am ready to pay someone to do it for me. Can any of you do this? How much do you want? > > Mike > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list