Ubuntu Installation with a Promise FastTrak TX2 RAID Controller

Whew....this is a bit of an enigma right now. I know I read about some potential issues with this controller card but it is what we have to use. I thought those issue were primarily around driver support and bit write issues. What I did not expect was the difficulty in installing Ubuntu 6.06 LTS onto a mirror array created with the controller. Perhaps this is a symptom of the "poor driver support" issue?

Others seem to have similar issues. This one with no response as of today. This one without the expertise to resolve. A hopeful possibility is this one which I will try next if need be.

When the installer gets to the partitioner section instead of seeing a single array to install on as I would expect, it see's the two physical drives. Of course that isn't really going to work now is it. (or....maybe I am missing something fundamental with Linux and hardware raid controllers?)

So, now I am starting from scratch since this is a temporary production rebuild. As I write this I deleted the old array, created a new mirror RAID 1 array from the two disks, select one as the primary image and the controller is copying the image. Once that finishes, I will attempt to do one more installation of Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS and see what happens.

If anyone has any ideas or thoughts, I welcome them.

UPDATE:

Finally realized that this discontinued controller is the cause of the issue and since we have to use the hardware available for this project, decided to go with software raid. Really not much performance difference since the controller wasn't offloading the array needs anyhow.

Found this post describing how to perform the manually partitioning for the installation although I disagree with a 10 GB root volume and a 100+ GB swap volume. So I flipped them around as we are going to be using this machine as a VMWare Server host. (Small installation).

Worked like a charm and I'm ready to start updating the system and getting the VMWare server installation cooking. We've already done this numerous times in our test environment. Too bad we didn't have this controller card in the test environment to had spotted this issue sooner. No harm, no foul. Time to move on.

Blessings!