Well, I've have no clue about RAID drives, but to in order to restore your boot loader, do what everyone else said, just "repair" your linux system. I screwed up XP, reloaded it once again installed it's own bootloader without asking me. I ran the install again on Suse and told it to repair the system, and it simply restored my Grub.

Thanks for your advice but visiting the site i understood that the program
is for multiple OS on the same hard disk . this is not my situation.
maybe i did not understood very well .
Anyway Sunday i will experiment everything and Monday morning i will inform all of you.
Thanks to all.

Hmm... I think it might be a little unclear on how XOSL actually works on www.ranish.com, but it actually works on multiple drives as well. My old system has XOSL installed on two disks, and I've set it to boot on Suse 8.2 as default after 5s, unless you press ESC, in which case you in a GRUB-like fashion get to choose from booting to Suse 8.2, XP pro, or the floppy disk, or whatever bootable device you have set XOSL to boot on. However it will not boot directly into SuSE 8.2, but into the old linux boot loader. Bla bla.... well as I said I really recommend it in case the normal procedures fail.

Good luck tomorrow!

HELLO , drowstar and to all of you.
trying to install xp on the second hard disk ( having linux on the first )
was impossible because whrn i placed the windows cd and i told windows to install itself on the second disk it told me that windows must put some
bootfiles to the first disk . i said OK but after this it told me that on the first disk
is something else and i must first format it and then install xp.
As you see i think that maybe it's not possible installing linux first and then
xp on separate disk .
what's your oppinion ??
the next step is to cancel linux and put xp on the first disk
and then trying to install linux on the second disk and when grub
go over mbr i will have a multiboot system or not ????
until now i understand the if you have 1 HARD DISK it's easy :
you put xp first then linux automatically make space and go after xp
and grub go over mbr .
NOW with 2 disk what ??
have you any idea what are the next steps to follow ????

Hi chriskar,
your assessment seems correct.
Easiest way would be to remove linux, install xp (make sure it doesnt use the second disk as well; will probably not happen) and then reinstall linux. Linux will set grub up to allow you to boot either windows or linux.

Good luck, seems you will finally get the system you wanted all along.
- drowstar

FINALLY I DID IT.Now i have a dualboot system .
what i did ?
i removed linux from first hard disk and installed xp first then
( having removed raid controller , this is all the secret , i could not making it
work with raid ) then i installed linux and it resized automatically my hard disk
giving 40 GB to windows and creating a swap of 1 GB and a root partition
of 79 GB .
The second disk was not touched and looking to the properties i see
that it is RAW what does it mean ????????????????????
now how can i use the second hard disk ?
i need to creat 3-4 partitios for my videos , mp3 fotos ecc and a partition
FAT 32 so linux can write and read also ?????????
what must i do ?
thanks to all .

Hi chriskar,
congratulations!

The second disk was not touched and looking to the properties i see that it is RAW what does it mean ????????????????????
I am not 100% positive, but I assume, raw means that it was not touched.

now how can i use the second hard disk ? i need to creat 3-4 partitios for my videos , mp3 fotos ecc and a partition FAT 32 so linux can write and read also ?????????
There is probably a way in YAST2 to do this. If not, check out qtparted. You can use this tool to create all the partitions you want. If you do that using YAST, it will probably also add it to your configuration, so you can easily use them.
To use these new partitions, you need to adjust your configuration. A quick search turned up quite a few pages that go into great detail about how to adjust this configuration file. There is also good information available in the man or info pages: man fstab or info fstab. Again, there is probably a way you can do it with YAST. And it is probably much easier to use and better integrated.
However, if you are willing to trust me, this configuration should do the trick (add it to your /etc/fstab file; you need to be root):
Look at the code: first line is a comment, you can leave that one out

the first element in each line is the device:
/dev/hdb1 means: hd ((E)IDE drive), b (second one), 1 (first partition)

the second element is the folder you want that device to be at:
This is different from windows, where you are stuck with c:, d: and so on (IIRC, maybe you can skip letters). I assumed you would want top level folders named after what you want to store in them. You can of course adjust that to your own requirements.
You need to create these folders before you can use them as mount points: mkdir /video

the third element is the file system type:
adjust that to what file system you chose: ext2, reiserfs, ext3, vfat (fat32, I am not very sure about that), ... (see man fstab for more info)

the fourth are options:
user: a user can mount the partition, auto: its automatically mounted on boot, exec: you can run programs from this partition. You may need to give users access to these drives: chown :users /video

dont bother about the fifth:
they should be ok the way they are


When you have adjusted fstab to your needs, you can try if it works: mount -a
Of course, I will be glad to assist you, if you have further questions.

Good luck,
- drowstar