Greets,

After weeks of pestering i finally convinced my best buddy to do a full conversion to linux, (yay my first one). I decided to start him off with Mandriva LE2005, i myself started off with mandrake 9.1 and was the easiest to adapt to, and install.. or so i thought.

My friend has an 11 month old Alienware Area-51 Uber Gaming machine, only problem, the Serial ATA Raid Problem. Heres the specs for anyone who wishes to help me out here.

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard
Intel P4 3.4Ghz
2GB of PC3200 RAM
2 Seagate Barracuda 80GB Serial ATA

and also on it it says something about Raid 0 Striping. Now, im not familiar with serial hard drives, i'm still using IDE, so im guessing the striping is the cable from the HDD's to the Mobo. Now heres the full story and problem...

Ok about 9pm last night we installed Mandriva, at the paritioning menu it said there was an error and that the partition table could not be read, i shrugged it off thinking that it had something to do with the drive being formatted in NTFS, yeah i know the partiton has nothing to do with the partition table, but after 4 beers....

After that, it installed without a hitch and said the hard drives were setup as follows.

/dev/sda - first HD
/dev/sda1 - boot
/dev/sda3 - home
/dev/sda5 or was it 8? - swap

and

/dev/sdb

So i was thinking to myself, yeah, looking good, total conversion in 5 minutes, hoho! But no, rebooted expecting to see the lilo loader, but instead all i get is a truck load of 9's

so i got my trusted knoppix cd out, booted it up with the cheat code linux26 for the 2.6.9 kernel, it detected the hdd's and i could access the file systems, i went to check /ect/lilo.conf to make sure that everything was tickety-boo, it was, lilo was trying to boot up /dev/sda1, so i was wondering what the hell was going on. I tried to boot up mandriva a few more times, but i still got the nines. So i pulled out the ibook, done some digging and asked questions on irc and i was told that it should be working and the 9's were a result of either a corrupt partition table or it was trying to boot up the wrong partition.

So after that i tried to install knoppix, it installed, went to reboot, and nothing, just the 9's again. So then i turned my head to slackware, tryed to install that, but it wouldn't even reconise the drives! I tried using all sorts of boot kernels such as; ataraid.i, adaptec.s, raid.s, scsi.s, scsi2.s and scsi3.s but none of them would reconise the hard drives when i tryed to repartition them using both cfdisk and fdisk, i tryed using /dev/sda, sdb, sdc and so on, none, even tried /dev/hda, hdb, hdc and so on, still no luck.

Please, please can anyone help me on this because i am just at an impass now and i want to do everything in my power from making him pull out the evil XP disk and installing that.

Any help will be GREATLY appreciated!

I don't know if the problems I had recently were related, but I'll suggest a few links
in case they are.

There are still a few bugs to be ironed out in terms of installing some Linux distribs
on SATA drives. From what I've read, it depends largely on the distribution you choose,
which SATA chipset your machine is using (and therefore which Linux driver) and your
BIOS settings.

Here are some articles which may help:


SATA Chipsets - Linux Support Status


Intel ICH5 SATA


This last one may not seem related, but it gives some valuable info. on relevant BIOS settings
How do I add a third party SATA driver to KNOPPIX at boot

Let us know how you make out.

newmoon