What I really want to do is to disable device-mapper on install ...

Sometimes … sometimes … helpful utilities are helpful. Like installation systems that present the raw hardware with drivers to me, and let ME decide what I want to do with them. Unfortunately … I often run head first into bad choices made by the installer coders or architects. Dm-raid is one of these cases. It is very hard to disable it from a Centos install. Very hard. Pretty close to damn near impossible. Hold it … why would we want to disable this? Simple. I (as in ME) want to control how my disks are configured. This isn’t a Centos issue, as they repackage RHEL. This is a RHEL issue. Device mapper is used when a fake-raid is detected … correctly or otherwise. In this case, the fake raid is incorrectly being detected. And I want to … badly … turn off the fake raid detection. Badly. brokenmodules=dm_… don’t seem to do the job.

Have I mentioned that this is frustrating? The problem is the autodetection code in anaconda. Surprise surprise. More anaconda problems. Not only is it a really fragile installer, easily (and non-recoverably) broken by the slightest variation from what it wants to do, but it doesn’t seem to do detection right. Yeah. Its annoying. I really … REALLY want to turn its magical autodetection off, or control it so it doesn’t keep blowing up on me. I’ve developed a philosophy (and code base) over the years that attempts to absolutely minimize the time spent in anaconda, due to its fragility. In a previous life, I completely worked around the SGI Irix installation process, creating my own. For pretty much the same reason, I needed absolute control over the installation, without the folks who wrote the original installer, having their choices get in the way of what I needed to accomplish. I keep finding myself back here. Same garbage, different OS. Grrrr. [update] I found a simple fix which allowed me to do everything I wanted to. I unstalled Ubuntu instead.