Hi,

I’m currently writing a little documentation on how to install CentOS 7 on manually partitioned disks, e. g. boot in Rescue Mode first, partition using fdisk or gdisk, reboot, start the installer and use the installer to format these partitions.

I have a total of 9 (3 x 3) situations:

* single disk (BIOS+MBR, BIOS+GPT, UEFI)
* RAID 1 on 2 disks (BIOS+MBR, BIOS+GPT, UEFI)
* RAID 6 on 4 disks (BIOS+ BR, BIOS+GPT, UEFI)

Everything works fine so far and I’ve completed seven out of nine of these setups. But right now I’m stuck with a problem on how to manually setup RAID 1
with UEFI.

Here’s what I do.

Fire up gdisk on /dev/sda.

Create 4 RAID partitions (FD00):

* 200 MB for /dev/md/EFI
* 500 MB for /dev/md/boot
* 4 GB for /dev/md/swap
* 55 MB for /dev/md/root

Create the RAID arrays:

# mdadm –create /dev/md/EFI –level=1 –raid-devices=2 \
–metadata=1.2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
mdadm: array /dev/md/boot started
# mdadm –create /dev/md/boot –level=1 –raid-devices=2 \
–metadata=1.2 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2
mdadm: array /dev/md/boot started
# mdadm –create /dev/md/swap –level=1 –raid-devices=2 \
–metadata=1.2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3
mdadm: array /dev/md/swap started
# mdadm –create /dev/md/root –level=1 –raid-devices=2 \
–metadata=1.2 /dev/sda4 /dev/sdb4
mdadm: array /dev/md/root started

And then I reboot, fire up the installer and assign these RAID arrays respectively to the EFI system partition as well as /boot, swap and /.

Unfortunately I won’t even reach the GRUB menu on boot. Only thing I get after the initial reboot is the EFI shell.

Now I’ve tried this again, this time partitioning *and* formating using Anaconda.

* one mountpoint for /boot/efi (RAID 1)
* one mountpoint for /boot (RAID 1)
* one mountpoint for swap (RAID 1)
* one mountpoint for / (RAID 1)

After the initial reboot, everything works fine. EFI on a RAID 1 array apparently works.

So what am I missing and/or doing wrong in my manual setup?

Cheers,

Niki
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