[ubuntu] 12.04.1, alternate CD hangs on grub-install - RAID

Hi, folks,

I managed to bork my 11.10 installation, probably with an unnecessary NVidia GPU driver upgrade. But I've been meaning to upgrade to 12.04 for a while, and so I'm trying to do that. I'm tired of managing my GPU driver issues manually, and I'm hoping that 12.04.1 will solve that problem for me.

Here's my configuration information:

• Gigabyte GA-MA78-US2H motherboard, 8 GB RAM, AMD Phenom II x6 1100T CPU
• NVidia 460 family GPU card
• Ubuntu 11.10 OS, 64-bit; no other operating systems to complicate matters
• Two hard drives operated in RAID1 configuration, administered by mdadm; four partitions; swap, root for 11.10, home, and one spare partition that I reserved for the root for 12.04

I downloaded both the standard and the alternate installations of 12.04.1, x86, 64-bit. Both passed their checksum tests, and I burned two CD's. My system boots from the 12.04.1 live CD (with the nomodeset option). I am using it right now.

Because I'm using RAID, I have been using the alternate CD's to install Ubuntu. I've been doing this with success since 10.10. But when I try this with 12.04.1, I only get up to grub-install, and then the system hangs. I've waited 15 minutes to an HOUR before giving up. The hard drives were thrashing the whole time. I had this exact same problem when I tried plain-old 12.04 (rather than 12.04.1) several months ago.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to why grub-install is failing, and how I might fix it?

Alternately: in a recent thread another poster hinted that you can install to a RAID from the standard, live CD, if you know what you are doing. He didn't give directions, though. How do I proceed? I figure that the first step would be to build my RAID. I can do that. From the Live CD, I am able to:

• sudo apt-get mdadm
• build all of my RAID1 partitions with a series of mdadm --create commands
• mount both the 11.10 root partition and the home partition.

Can I just run the graphical installation process from there? The empty partition that I reserved for 12.04 won't mount, obviously, because it isn't formatted yet.