In setting up this site, I decided that I wanted to use a RAID 10 (RAID 1+0) array for increased performance and also protection from downtime/data loss. The server that I got had software raid that still showed the drives as 4 seperate drives in the Debian installer. After getting a 3ware 9550SX-4LP and installing that, I set up the RAID array, booted into the Etch installer and all seemed to be going well.

The installer saw only 1 drive (which is exactly what I wanted) but after setting up my partitions, it would stop at 33% and not go any further. I was using the default ext3 filesystem and after doing some googling, I decided to try a different filesystem. I chose JFS and everything went smoothly after that.

If you’re having trouble getting installed using a RAID controller, try a different filesystem and see if that helps. Here are a couple of links to research filesystems and decide which one you want to try:

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388
http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html
http://linuxgazette.net/122/piszcz.html