So, after installing Zentyal succefully as 'non-expert', I know am reinstalling it in expert mode. At some point it tells me that the installer has detected mounted partition on /dev/sda.
Opening a terminal with 'alt-f2' and looking at df, it seems that /dev/sda1 is mounted on /media.
The installer ask to try and umount it, and I choose YES.
I then go to the 'manual' partition option, and:
- delete /dev/sda1
- delete the swap partition on /dev/sda
- create 4 new primary partitions: 100GB, 4GB, 500GB, 396GB, in that order, and mark them all as physical disk for RAID.
- create a new partition tabel on /dev/sdb, and then create exactly the same partitions as on /dev/sda
Then I go to configure RAID, and the installer writes the partitions to disk before it lets me create MD devices.
I strat to create the first MD device, RAID1, all default options, and get a list of devices. I want to use /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1, but /dev/sdb1 is not in the list! (/dev/sda1234 are, and /dev/sdb234 too)
What happened? A quick peek at the terminal tells me that there are 3 block device (with blkid)
/dev/sdc1 (the usb stick)
/dev/sda1 (formatted as ext4, from the previoius install !!!!!)
/dev/sdb1 (TYPE=linux_raid_member).
Remember, that disk had no partition tabel (and i wiped it with dd first!)
cat /proc/mdstat indeed tells me that there is one md device:
md127 inactive sdb1([1](S)
soooooooooooooooooo.... the partitioner/installer/os picked up a partition that once upon a time was created as linux raid autodetect!
(that was happening to me various times yesterday, before I decided to wipe the disk with dd... which aparantely not helped, maybe some superblockl laying around? Can't bend my head around this one!!!
So, i use the installer option to delete this device, and after that, create the 4 raid devices, now /dev/sdb1 is in the list.
The next step is assignng these drives.
So, I assign Raid device #1 (99.9GB, 512 B unusable) to ext4, mount point /
(all the devices have 512 B unusable)
#2 4GB swap area
#3 499.9 GB /home, reserved area 0%
#4 396.1 GB /data, reserved area 0%
This is how I've done it hundreds of times :-)
After 'finish, write to disk', it all seems find, and I get asked if I want to do without X, no, I want X, and then 'installing the system....'
and low and behold! The install succeeded! (In previous tries, it gave the busybox error).
When all is done, I remove the usb stick while it's rebooting, and ... it skips booting from the harddrive, and goes straight in to network booting.
To describe the process followed until now:
1. install Zentyal 4 in expert mode with software raid, all is well, but it doesn't boot from harddisk.
2. try several other installs, as in Ubuntu desktop/guided (works well), Ubuntu server (doesn't boot),
3. try more installs, but get thwarted by either 'this partitions is already mounted', 'ext4 filesystem creation failed' or 'busybox can not be installed'
4. wipe disks
5. finally (after 18 tries, I kid you not) back at sqaure 1.