Unknown Error during installation...

[ethon]

Getting an "Unknown error" when Anaconda comes up.

I am booting an ISO from a thumb drive, attempting to install to an SSD, the only other drive on the system.

If I disable SATA in bios or unplug the SSD completely, I do not get the crash.

The SSD is newly formatted and works on another machine.

Where to go from here?

[BShT]

try AHCI and IDE at BIOS SATA options

runaway from RAID

[ethon]

try AHCI and IDE at BIOS SATA options

runaway from RAID

Already did that. RAID is turned off in bios. LSI RAID card is completely removed physically from server.

No change.

[TrevorH]

How did you copy the iso to the USB stick? Many of the windows based tools corrupt it as they "copy" it *i.e they don't copy it, they try to be clever and "fix" it at the same time when it doesn't need fixing). Please see the link in my signature to teh USB Install wiki page that details which those are.

A hardware RAID controller should not be the problem. What may be a problem is disks that have been previously used for BIOS RAID as those have a signature written to them to show they are BIOS RAID members and the installer does not like those when seen as part of something that is not BIOS RAID. You may need to wipe the disk(s) first using dmraid -E -r (read the man page for dmraid as that may not be the correct syntax).

[ethon]

I will use another tool to create the USB and see what happens.

What may be a problem is disks that have been previously used for BIOS RAID as those have a signature written to them to show they are BIOS RAID members and the installer does not like those when seen as part of something that is not BIOS RAID

Question though, the SSD hard drive was formatted with another system before it was placed into the new server. Are you saying it's still possible that it retains some kind of RAID identity on it even though it has been formatted?

[ethon]

Recreated the USB using Rawrite32. No change.

[TrevorH]

Yes, the RAID signature data is written outside the area that gets formatted when it's partitioned.

[ethon]

Yes, the RAID signature data is written outside the area that gets formatted when it's partitioned.

Okay, so how to clear? Tried dmraid in recovery but it says invalid command.

[TrevorH]

Boot a CentOS 7 iso and use its rescue env which does have the dmraid command? Or dd /dev/zero over the last 10MB (to be safe, probably the last 1MB is enough) on the disk?

[ethon]

DD solved the issue. A noob lesson in formatting and superblocks for me.