Package: debian-installer Version: 20081029 Severity: grave I have a system with /dev/sd{a1,b2} and /dev/sd{a2,b3} being two separate RAID1s, /dev/md[01] respectively.
Due to historic reasons, /dev/sdb1 is a small partition with something else. Also, historically, /dev/sd[ab] used to be part of an array themselves (the whole disk, not just a partition). As a result, mdadm could identify three arrays on this system: 1. /dev/sd[ab] 2. /dev/sd{a1,b2} 3. /dev/sd{a2,b3} I wanted to run mdadm --zero-superblock on /dev/sd[ab] to clear up the mess and because I have a working netboot setup, I thought I'd just use the Debian-installer's rescue mode to get exclusive access to the disks, which mdadm needs. I started rescue mode and was surprised that only /dev/sd[ab] were created, but no partitions. A glance into /proc/mdstat shows that the installer had auto-assembled /dev/sd[ab] into /dev/md0 and md was happily synchronising and overwriting my /dev/sdb1 partition. Arguably, since /dev/sd[ab] held valid superblocks, they could have been assembled. However, the other two pairs also held valid superblocks, yet the installer didn't care. I strongly oppose to any form of RAID auto-assembly in rescue mode, which is only a sure-fire way to wreck your data. Auto-assemble should not take place especially when there are nested superblocks. -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_GB, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash -- .''`. martin f. krafft <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> : :' : proud Debian developer, author, administrator, and user `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck - http://debiansystem.info `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
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