FAI failure...

[Ian Colquhoun]

Hi Folks,

I'd just like to say that FAI is great and works wonderfully except
with one small problem I'm having.

I'm installing some machines that have built in RAID cards - AMI
Megaraids, but that's irrelevant. The problem is, that when I
initialize a RAID set in the BIOS, it creates a logical disk that
Linux sees without any trouble as /dev/sda, however, the BIOS's
initialization does not create an empty partition table on the disk.
Unfortunately, the default scripts FAI uses seem to require that some
sort of partition table be readable from the disk by sfdisk, otherwise
setup_harddisks fails.

I was thinking about just adding a line into setup_harddisks that
simply writes out any old table:

sfdisk /dev/sda << EOF
;
EOF

The problem is, that not only is it ugly, but it would of course break
the preserve functionality without some checks for a valid table
first.

Anyone have any elegant ways around this? Should this be integrated
into FAI for everyone? Am I just plain missing something?

BTW, once I write a blank table to the disk manually and start the
process over again, FAI works great! My woody install takes less than
4 mins from boot to reboot.

Thanks,
Ian.