New installation on existing RAID1

Support & Help Requests
#1

Hello.
I am using original ubuntu 15.10 for more than year.
Desktop version, but i reconfigured it to have mate desktop as default.
I dont like this configuration because unity desktop sometimes mess wallpaper and there are many apps i dont need from unity. I am not very good at linux, so when i uninstalled unity, also mate stopped working and there were also many other problems.
I am using RAID 1 created during instalation of original ubuntu.

I have learned, that there is also Ubuntu mate, and i want to upgrade ubuntu to 16.04.
But i cannot assign existing raid 1 during installation process of ubuntu mate.
It only see sda1 sda2 sda3 and sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 and sdc1 partitions, but not md0, md1 and md2 and cannot pair it.

How to proceed please?
My setting is:
md2 (sda3 + sdb3) which i dont want to loose - i cannot back it elsewhere - it is almost 4TB 90% full of data.
md1 (sda2 + sdb2) - there is ubuntu 15.10 installed - i want to format and have there root 16.04 (almost 60GB)
md0 (sda1 + sdb1) - swap partition (almost 4GB)
sdc1 - micro sd card with bootloader (16GB)

I dont know if this is important, but (i dont know why) I have to press TAB during instalation
because i have this loop message:
Missing parameter in configuration file. Keyword: path
gfxboot.c32: not a COM32R image
boot :

Can you help me please with some direction?
Thank You

#2

Problem Solved.
I installed Ubuntu Server 16.04 and than ubuntu-mate-core.
This was not working in 15.10 - I was not able to startX on boot at previous build.

#3

Hi,

I’ve been installing Ubuntu on RAID1 and RAID10 for many years using the desktop installer. One problem when installing to RAID from the server installer is that it requires a RAID for each partition, even though ALL “md” RAID’s are now partition-able by default. It is possible to install to a partitioned RAID using either the server or desktop installer, but problems occur if the installer can’t work out which device to install grub onto, then you have to abort the installation and install grub manually. However, when you try to boot into the newly installed system, the “md” RAID package will not be present unless it was present in the “squashfs” payload of the installer. A work-around is to install “mdadm” in a chroot manually before rebooting after the desktop installer finishes.

However, a simpler option is to install from a remastered version of the desktop installer .iso that has the “mdadm” package pre-installed. I’ve remastered Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with “mdadm” pre-installed to create Bio-Linux 8.0.8. This involved a build Bio-Linux pipeline based on some ad-hoc scripts that we’ve used for quite a long time: Bio-Linux 9 will be based on a remastered version of Ubuntu-MATE 18.04 LTS, because we have been using “x2go” and MATE for a long time now on remote Bio-Linux desktops and I want to run MATE locally by default because many of the laptops people want to use to run Bio-Linux (or servers hosting “x2go” remote desktops for that matter) don’t have good enough graphics available to support hardware-accelerated desktops like Unity or Gnome3.

More recently, I’ve remastered the beta1 .iso to include “mdadm” using Customizer. This makes installing to “md” RAID much easier: The only manual step required is to create the RAID before starting the installation. After that, the installer can find the boot device to install grub into and the newly installed system will boot without any problems provided you wait until the RAID is built or add “bootdegraded=y” to the grub option in the installer’s target filesystem before rebooting after installation. I’ve installed several systems from scratch using my custom version of the Ubuntu-MATE beta1 .iso. It is especially convenient if the RAID already exists, because you can just use the normal default installer options to get a bootable system.

I’m now using “Customizer” to add the Bio-Linux and Debian-Med packages to the .iso, not just for installation but also to use it as a ‘live’ USB for teaching Bioinformatics courses.

Anyone interested in developing or using Bio-Linux under Ubuntu-MATE, please post a message to the bio-linux-list

Thanks,

Tony.