Nforce 3 ultra software raid while installing debian
 

My computer has 3 hard disks, 2 200GB's and a 80GB I got from my old comp. Until about 2 hours ago, I had windows on a raid 0 array eith the 2 200GB's, and gentoo on the 80GB, and I decided that since i spend 99% of my time in linux anyway, it should be on the big HD, and I am sick of gentoo, it takes way too much work to keep working, do i want to install debian, cause I've heared it's a lot better. so I run the installer and when i get to the partitioning screen, it sees that i have 2 200GB hard disks (they are on SATA btw) but it thinks they are seperate, I know i have to somehow get it to use some kind of software raid, but I can't get to a console or anything from the installer, so it's a little tough to do things like modprobe and recompile kernels and such.

Any help would be vastly appreciated, so thanks in advance for any you can give.

You have to run dmraid to see the meta information that the controller BIOS planted.

To access two files at once, RAID 1 (mirror) will be better. RAID 0 (stripping) is the best when recording raw video and sound. Also RAID 0 is better to transfer huge files over a 1 Gb network.

Gentoo is not hard to keep it working. IMHO, package based distributions like Debian is going to be hard to keep up with updates because of dependencies. The only way to experience Linux is to compile each library and program which Gentoo does very easily. It is better to spread the updates through the week than doing it all at once.

To get to a console while in the Debian installation program (any version), just press <alt><f2>. One other thing. I've been working on an Nforce 2 motherboard. Chances are Debian will not auto-detect your sound or networking hardware, assuming that those things are on the motherboard. You'll probably need to download the drivers for those off the nVidia website to get them working properly. (http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp)