redhat 7.1 xfs installer

[Jakub Otwinowski <kuba@iwonka.med.virginia.edu>]

I have found a few bugs with this redhat 7.1 xfs installer. They have caused 
me much anguish as I spent some 8+ hours working on this.

Here is the system:
Tyan 25HSEL mobo
2 3ware escalade 6800 (can connect 8 disks each)
16 80 gig disks

short story:
after installation fstab is blank and kudzu hangs
and the disks work very very slowly (could be unrelated to xfs)
cd rescue mode crashes

long story:
I installed the system with the xfs redhat 7.1 installer. It took very long, 
almost 2 hours. On the first boot it doesn't get past "checking for new 
hardware" although the disks seem to be active. I reboot and I notice a 
message that it mounted / with ext2 and after that it tries to fsck it, 
fails, and gives me a maintenance shell. This doesn't help because whatever i 
try to do it says / is mounted read only. I notice fstab is completely blank. 
Eventually i put in the cd again and ran "linux rescue". It crashed giving me 
some errors about raid. I had 8 disks in a hardware raid 5 array and the 
other 8 were marked as linux raid partitions but no software array was 
actually made. It was like this because i was going to do software raid but 
then changed my mind.
I reinstalled the system this time deleting the raid partitions which were 
not in use. It was very slow again. I booted with the same problems as 
before. So i ran the cd in rescue mode. This time it didn't crash. I saw a 
message that it mounted / and repaired it. I mount / myself and take out 
kudzu so it doesn't load on boot. I don't know much about mtab but i noticed 
it is what fstab should look like so i 'cp /etc/mtab /etc/fstab'
and everything works well except reading and writing.
We have another machine which is identical that was installed with regular 
redhat 7.1 and supposedly it was really slow with reading and writing for its 
first few days or weeks and then it got better. I wasn't around then but now 
I'm writing this email from it. It has 2 hardware raid 5 arrays. But this new 
machine's disks are really slow. I don't know much about hdparm -t but i ran 
it on both.
Old machine: 66 Mb/sec
New machine: ~200 Kb/sec
>From writing files through the network it seems to write faster than 200 
Kb/sec.
Kudzu still hangs when i run it and it mounts fine after a hard reset.
	-Jakub O.