[CentOS] Install CentOS 6.3 to partitionable mdadm array

Wed Nov 7 15:10:29 UTC 2012
Hal Martin <hal.martin at gmail.com>

Hello all,

I'm trying to install CentOS 6.3 to an mdadm partitionable array and
not having any luck.

The installer only allows me to create one file system per md device,
or specify the md device as a LVM physical volume. I don't want to do
either, I want to create one md device and create multiple partitions
on top of the md device.

I thought that perhaps the installer was preventing me from doing this
because it wasn't possible to boot off a partitionable mdadm array,
but through googling I don't believe this is the case. (See links at
the bottom of this email)

I've tried the graphical installer and the text-mode installer, and
neither gives me the ability to install to a partitionable mdadm
array.

Even more annoying is that if I manually create such an array,
partition it and create file systems, the installer will stop the
array when starting the partitioning utility, preventing me from
installing to the partitions I created.

Is there an advanced mode in the installer that I can force it to
install to a partitionable md device, or is that not an option? I'd
like to avoid having multiple md devices on the same physical drives,
and unfortunately the application I'm installing doesn't place nicely
with LVM.

Thanks,
Hal

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/md.txt
http://www.miquels.cistron.nl/raid/
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=447818