I put this off for awhile and now I'm back at it.  I find it extremely 
disheartening that every set of instructions I find anywhere fails.  They 
all fail and this is such a simple problem.  I just want to install Ubuntu 
10.10 with RAID 1 on a pair of identical 2.0 TB disks.  I have done it 
maybe 20 times and it has never once been able to boot.

I was hoping to be able to use these instructions from B-o-B...


On Tue, 12 Jul 2011, Mr. B-o-B wrote:

> Try to do the raid prep/setup outside of the Ubuntu installer first.
>
> This is how I setup software RAID 1's, and this has worked every time 
> for me. I have to be honest I haven't done this on Ubuntu, but I did 
> just load the latest Ubuntu live cd to check, and all the commands exist 
> so this should work fine.  I have done this >30 times on Slackware, and 
> a handful of times on Centos & Fedora.  I actually used a Slackware 
> install disk to setup the raid's on Fedora & Centos, but this is not 
> necessary.  The Ubuntu disk will work just fine.
>
> I personally like fdisk to create my partitions, but can use cfdisk (or 
> anything else Ubuntu might have that you like).  One disk 1 (lets call 
> it /dev/sda) Create at least two partitions (one for swap & one for /). 
> Change the types on both partitions to "Linux RAID autodetect" type 
> "FD".

I couldn't get through even that part.

The first problem is that fdisk says that I have a GUID partition and I 
should use GNU parted.  In gparted I can delete partitions but not so much 
that fdisk doesn't complain about the GUID partitioning.  So I need to 
know what I am supposed to be doing with fdisk here.  Do I really want an 
msdos partition?  How is this done?

Unfortunately, the detailed B-o-B instructions didn't help me (though I am 
dying to try them) because I couldn't get past this initial step.

Every other set of instructions I've found on the web fails at some point. 
With at least one of them I get all the way through, it seems like it has 
worked, but then I try to start the machine and it won't boot.  Next I 
look for ways to fix that and I haven't been able to fix it.  So I delete 
everything and start over.

After working on this for dozens of hours I am ready to pay someone to do 
it for me.  Can any of you do this?  How much do you want?

Mike