On Fri, 2021-12-31 at 09:48 +0100, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
Most likely Larry Len Rainey's diagnosis is right: Firmware setting the controller into "raid" mode, causing it to be not easily manageable by linux. This would be probably in line with the error you are seeing about a "MdContainer" not being deleted. This is likely not about a docker container -- I don't think YaST knows anything about docker yet -- but about a md as in "multiple devices" -- Linux softraid -- "container", an agglomeration of disks, as which the windows raid setup is detected, but can't be managed.
In the past, Intel RST was basically a software RAID solution with the hardware being supported either by the ahci or isci SATA drivers. The RAID meta data used the intel matrix format ("imsm" in MD RAID/mdadm terms), and it used to work just nicely with this combination (iscsi or ahci + MD RAID). So here we seem to have an NVMe configuration instead. In principle, nvme + MD RAID should also work.
The "Details..." button shows - "cannot delete MdContainer" and again I can only choose "OK" to dismiss this rather useless error message. I got no idea what an MdContainer" is!
This is a bad error message, but it almost certainly means an MD-RAID (aka Linux native software RAID) array, as Stefan stated. (*) The big question is why YaST was trying to remove the MD array. This looks wrong. Perhaps Intel has changed the meta data in ways that are incompatible with what mdadm supports. This would make sense with Stefan's hypothesis that this is not a regular RAID array but rather a caching solution of some sort. Under Linux, cache layering would normally be represented using lvmcache or bcache, not MD RAID. Still, even if the RAID meta data is unsupported, YaST shouldn't try to remove it. Doing so successfully would have destroyed your Windows installation with high likelihood. To figure out what's going on, you need to open a bug and attach full yast and boot logs of your installation attempt. If you do, feel free to set me on CC. You may also want to switch to a terminal (ctrl-alt- f2) and run "mdadm --examine /dev/nvme0n1" (or whatever your disk device is). If the Windows installation is actually using a combination of firmware setting and Windows (RST?) driver that's incompatible with Linux MD- RAID, you will have to change the firmware settings and reinstall Windows (or use virtualization, Larry suggested). Martin (*) It's called a "container" because the IMSM meta data can hold definitions of multiple RAID arrays. In practice, that matters only on servers with many disks. On laptops there's usually just one array, but MD-RAID still needs to represent the "container" and the actual array separately.