Hi

I am afraid of using the mdadm tool in linux, in fear of destroying my perfectly functioning RAID (In Windows) - that is picked up as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb in Linux.

Has anybody worked with these before?
01:0d.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3512 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 01)

Any help or advice much appreciated

I hate to break it to you, but you don't have a hardware raid. It's software raid.

Making a backup of your Windows partition is probably not a bad idea before playing around, but I don't see a problem with using mdadm to create raid partitions on the remaining free space on the drives.

You might also want to check out dmraid.

I think you are absolutely right to be concerned. I would never try to use one RAID array with two different RAID software packages. Keep one RAID software for the array. Buy new disks for a Linux RAID array.

Or get a hardware RAID card. Then you wouldn't need to use the software RAID on the operating systems. That would be the only way that I would share a RAID array between two different operating systems.

[Oh rupertwh. You beat me by mere seconds! ]

In order to access the data on your array you'll need to run dmraid. Do a search here on LQ and you'll probably find several posts from me and others on how to use it. I use dmraid to dual boot Windows and Linux on my test machine on a really old FastTrak66 FakeRaid card. It seems to work just fine.

dmraid works perfectly for me (ich7 controller). Just do dmraid -a and then look in /dev/mapper if it found something.

Thanks a lot for the info. I have managed to mount my 1.4TB NTFS Raid1 under Linux with no effort.

I am using Ubuntu 7.04 which is truly the first Linux that I can give to anybody to install and be sure that they'll be able to do a lot more than with Windows!

I simply did an:
root@ubuntu:/mnt# apt-get install dmraid

The install autodetected some stuff, shortly after:

root@ubuntu:/mnt# ls /dev/mapper
control sil_agajdfbicfab sil_agajdfbicfab1
root@ubuntu:/mnt# mkdir /media/RAID
root@ubuntu:/mnt# mount /dev/mapper/sil_agajdfbicfab1 /media/RAID

And Whalla... my RAID is visible from Linux. From here it's trivial to add an entry to /etc/fstab, or probably use some built-in Ubuntu tool I have yet to come across, to make sure the drive mounts automatically when I need it.

PS "dmraid -a y" is the correct command, but as I said, Ubuntu ran this automatically.

dmraid: Device-Mapper Software RAID tool

*wooot*

PS you probably want to use the following mount options:
-o uid=<username>,gid=users

Like:
mount /dev/mapper/sil_agajdfbicfab1 /media/RAID/ -o uid=ubuntu,gid=users

So that you don't have to run your file manager as root in order to access the disk!

so even after using dmraid with ya raid on Linux are you able to take that hardware card and drive set to windows and have it just work (meaning the data pops up and all)?