I'm trying to install Fedora 7 on PM8M-V (VIA P4M800 VT8237R) motherboard. There is built-in hardware (fake) raid VT6420. Even though I disable RAID using the MB setup utility, the installation process loads the SATA raid driver and only offers to install the system on /dev/mapper/via_digdaaicad, so /dev/sba and /dev/sbd are not visible at the installation stage.

So, my question is how to make /dev/sda and /dev/sdb visible and the installation stage and disable the hardware raid.

PS. The hardware raid is no good, if I disconnect a single drive, the system wouldn't load saying the following:

device-mapper: table:253:0 mirror: Device lookup failure
device-mapper:reload ioctl failed: No such device or address
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
No volume groups found
Volume group "VolGroup00" not found
Unable to access resume device (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01)
mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such device or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such device or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such device or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such device or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

I apologize for duplicate post, I found a solution which might be helpful for others, so I'm posting it here:

1. Disable the RAID (switch to the IDE mode) using the MB setup program.
2. Boot from Fedora cd or dvd.
3. Upon receiving initial menu, highlight "Install or upgrade an existing system".
4. Hit <TAB>, you will receive the following prompt:
> vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img
Append the line above as follows:
> vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img nodmraid
5. Hit <Enter> and voila, when you get the partitioning screen, there is no
/dev/mapper/via_digdaaicad under the "Select the drive(s) to use for this installation, but there
are both sda and sdb drives.

I also successfully tried those steps with an nvidia MB with HW raid controller built in.

I guess this thread can be closed

I had the same problem installing Fedora 7. I could not see my separate drives, just a mapper device. When I remove one of the drives from the system. My bootup failed with "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!".

I shall try the suggested fix however.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks for taking the time to post your solution, as you can see, it is already helping others.