On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 12:57 PM, Larry Linder
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Removed 5 th disk and tried a LVM install and it did not see disk 2, 3, 4 and
> you could not find if they were mounted or ? -  nothing.

Larry, I've discussed parts of this several times now.

1) Stop trying to partition everything at install time. Talk only to
the first disk. Really.

2) You keep starting with previously partitioned disks. These are not
the "new" disks" you mentioned at first, and so are much more prone to
fascinating interactions of previous work than "new" disks.

In particular, they may have fascinating remnants of previous
partitioning and especially of LVM configuration,. The worst of these
is a problem I ran into with SL 5 and equivalent operating systems,
where the remnants of an LVM is detected but reported as inactive, and
needs to be activated and cleared manually.

So: stop playing with the installer for one round. The anaconda
hub/spoke model does not provide the full range of command line tool
options. It's a problem with a lot of open source GUI's, and is one of
the guidelines Eric Raymond added to his "Luxury of Ignorance" essay
years ago, namely:

    > Are there settings you can do from the command line or
hand-editing config files that cannot be done from the GUI? Are they
documented anywhere? Does using the GUI erase these settings?

That's a guideline I sent him and he quoted as a postscript in the
essay, and I suggest that it applies here. You need to get to the
command line and use the :LVM commands such as "pvgroup", "vggroup",
and "lvgroup" to check for existing LVM configurations, and *remove*
them. You can boot the installation DVD into "rescue" mode, by
selecting the installation options and adding the word "rescue" to the
boot options.

When you're in the Anaconda GUI, you should be able to hit
"Ctrl-Alt-F2" will get you to the running command line virtual
terminal, and "Ctrl-Alt-F1" will get you back to the GUI.  The basic
tools of "fdisk" for small disks, and "parted" for larger disks will
give you some access to existing disk configurations,, and "pvscan",
"vgscan", and "lvscan" will report existing LVM configurations so you
can *erase* them. You may need to reset them as "active" with
"lvchange", in order to clear them completely. I can't help you with
that.

> Decided to go back to orig. hand lay out and when you get it done it says that
> sda must have a GPT disk Label.   There are no provisions to do this and its
> not done automatically in any scheme we can find.

The "parted" command has this, and it's what anaconda uses. It's much
more easily scripted. "fdisk" does not support it.

> The scheme the guys used months ago does not work of allowing it to create
> disk label and then bail out.
> Ounce you try to use the LVM there is no way to get back to square 1.

See above.

> This is really getting DUMB.   Right next to this box is a another box with
> 6.2 loaded and using a manual partitioning scheme that has worked for us
> forever.   We never tried to use LVM on this system.

Welcome to "recovering from a previously installed system gets nasty".

> How do you not allow a user to install the system any way he may need it.
> The failure to allow the fifth disk to be installed is pretty bad.

You've reported a wide variety of interactions and edge cases, too
many to debug all of them. I urge you to *stop playing* with setting
all the disks up at install time. Use the command line tools if
needed, and if nothing set up some tasks to simply zero all the disks
simultaneously, and come back the next da and start from there.

> The last try will be an install with a new mother board and new disks and then
> we quit fooling around.
>
> My only complaint is that how do a bunch of kids take a nice operating system
> and totally louse it up.
>
> Larry Linder

There's a great deal I don't like about the anaconda installer, but
please stop blaming your problems on other components. Simplify the
problem: clear the old file system configs, *all* of them, and if
nothing, start with only one drive attached at install time, *then*
add the other drives.