On Sun, 2 Oct 2011, Mike Miller wrote: > This seems to describe the problem I am having: > > http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1631358 Yes!! I can't believe it finally is working. The major fix was given by B-o-B on July 12, 2011, in this same thread. It just took me awhile to figure out how to use it (with a tip from Thomas Lunde). I'll explain all of the steps below. I had two new 2TB HDDs and had been getting a bunch of junk (e.g., corrupted partitions) building up on them from repeated attempts at installing Ubuntu, but I didn't have any data on them. At one point gparted wouldn't even open -- it was crashing on startup and fdisk couldn't do anything (it recommended gparted). Luckily, Thomas Lunde on TCLUG gave me this tip: sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 count=1024 sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1024 count=1024 I used the Ubuntu 10.10 x64 Desktop Live CD to "try" Ubuntu and run those commands (from Application -> Terminal) and those that follow. My HDDs were /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. After that I opened gparted and it seemed to show there were problems with the drives, but it did show them and it didn't crash. In gparted I told it to create an MSDOS partition table. I believe I went into the "Device" menu to do that. I was only trying to make it so that I could use fdisk. After the two dd commands above, fdisk still couldn't work with the drives because of some residual GPT data on them, but now that gparted had created the MSDOS partition table, fdisk worked. sudo fdisk /dev/sda In fdisk I first ran recommended 'c' and 'u' commands (recommended in a note at fdisk startup). Then I used 'n' to create two new partitions (1 and 2), for root and swap, respectively, and I used 't' to change the type for both to fd (that's the hex code for the raid type). I exited with 'w'. The sfdisk command recommended by B-o-B to copy the partition info from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb did not work for me, so I simply repeated the exact steps I used on /dev/sda on /dev/sdb starting with this command: sudo fdisk /dev/sdb Next I ran these two commands (one line each) to create the raid: sudo mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level 1 --raid-devices 2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 --metadata=0.90 sudo mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level 1 --raid-devices 2 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 --metadata=0.90 ...and I formatted the swap array: sudo mkswap /dev/md1 Luckily for me, that was all I needed from the B-o-B instructions because the grub boot loader ended up working without any extra steps. B-o-B next told me "Now start your install like normal. You should see /dev/md1 available for your swap, and /dev/md0 available for your root." Well, I tried using the Ubuntu 10.10 x64 Desktop CD first, but that didn't work -- it did not show the /dev/md? partitions. Looking from Live CD again, I didn't see them, but I probably wasn't looking the right way, because they extisted on some level. I know that because I next went back to the Alternate CD and it detected the RAID. The swap partition seemed to be ready to go, so I partitioned the big partition for root (mounted at /) using ext4. I let the Alt CD finish running and when it got to grub I was afraid, as always because of so many past failures, but it sailed right through it. B-o-B also recommended that I check the /etc/fstab file to make sure that "swap & / are pointing to /dev/md0 & /dev/md1": /dev/md1 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/md0 / ext3 defaults 1 1 I hope it isn't a problem, but after rebooting I see this instead: # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/md0 during installation UUID=f322a6dc-f6b7-4207-a1fb-4cace87ca2db / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 /dev/md1 none swap sw 0 0 I think that's OK, but let me know if it doesn't look right. Anyway, it did reboot after installation and it looks beautiful. Thanks to everyone for the help, especially B-o-B and Thomas Lunde. Mike