Raid support for Ubiquity Installer
Ubiquity should allow the user to create raid partitions during install, instead of using Alternate CD.
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Although there are two kinds of common raid setups in user desktops, (nearly always a form of software raid) - neither are supported in the ubiquity installer.
The first (and I suspect most common) is the chipset supplied raid-1 or raid-0 that is supplied by many desktop motherboards (Via, Nivida, etc): these usually have a mini bios that has options to setup and add connected hard drives as/into raid configurations.
The second is the less used windows raided disks (made using Windows drive management tools).
Imagine the scenario where a user has a current windows xp installation across 2 sata disks, that have been configured in an nvidia raid setup as Raid-0.
The user boots off a 8.10 x86 Live CD, starts up ubiquity and is presented with the option to install to either of the 2 disks (each with unknown partitions) - This is bad, a non-informed user is likely to select one of these disk, break the raid, and destroy their other OS. The best solution would be to offer them their current soft raid device just as another option during the select partition stage, even allowing the users to resize the raid-0 windows installation to make room for an ubuntu slice. Better still it should warn users when they select a disk or partition that is part of an existing raid group.
This sounds like a lot of work, however raid support (non windows raid - chipset raid) is supplied by the dmraid package.
sudo dmraid -r
provides the physical devices in use by a raid controller
/dev/sdd: nvidia, "nvidia_ibfbejec", stripe, ok, 488397166 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdc: nvidia, "nvidia_ibfbejec", stripe, ok, 488397166 sectors, data@ 0
sudo dmraid -ay
provides the logical partitions
RAID set "nvidia_ibfbejec" already active
RAID set "nvidia_ibfbejec1" already active
so in this case giving the user an option to install to /dev/mapper/
or choosing a whole disk installation to /dev/mapper/
should be enough.
There is the further work to support windows drive management tool created raids,
The package that supports these seems to be mdadm - however I believe that most users that use raid will be using chipset supplied raid solutions
