For whoever buys a Dell XPS 8700 in the future:
- Disable secure boot
- Set onboard storage to AHCI instead of RAID; save BIOS settings and reboot
- Zero first and last sector of the 2T drive (in my case, /dev/sda:
fdisk -s /dev/sda
This gives the number of sectors
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 count=1024
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=(number_of_sectors – 20) bs=1024 count=1024 # slightly
more, just to be sure
)
- Install Fedora 19 and be happy (you might have to explicitly reclaim space from
/dev/sda, but that's easy from the installer).
Note that the "clean" way
dmraid -r -E /dev/sda
won't work. The installer will die with "error wiping old signatures".
Ciao,
seba
PS: Thanks to Dan Thurman for suggesting Fedora 17: I was able to solve the problem
digging the message error given by the installer and chasing links. The fact that newer
versions of the installer skip the drives *without any error or warning message* is a
regression IMHO.
PPS: I have no idea as to whether the 32GB SSD cache is being used.