cmd 649 & sil 3112
 

Hi, so i made this linux work! and it really cool too, now i just need to find a way to acces my data as well. I have a dual os system with win xp on one hd, linux on another. Trouble is i also have a cmd 649 raid controller, not running raid though, but attached are two 120 gb hd. Then i have a sil 3112 sata chip (onboard) and 2 250 gb disks on that, no raid here either. I can mount and acces the winxp disk fine enough, but these other four i can only find in the harddrake util. Do i need drivers for the sil 3112 and the cmd 649? in harddrake i can se the units so mandrake apperantly recognises them... To complicate matters they are all dynamic disks, reading through some ot the other questions i decided to install the lvm package, but then that didnt really help me. Any suggestions?

See if the disks and partitions are deteced by the kernel on boot (dmesg | less). AFAIK 2.6 kernel has support for these 2 chipsets you mentioned as well as win2k/xp logical disk manager(dynamic disks).
I'm not sure about the kernel used in Mandrake but if support for these chipsets are compiled as modules you maybe need to modprobe cmd64x / siimage

thx for the answer, yes all is as u said, the controllers are recognised just fine, now i just need to find out how i acces dynamic disks. I went back to winxp and reformatted one of the drives to a normal logic partition (instead of a dynamic disk) and voila i can acces it in mandrake. but moving around 700 gb of data to reformat the drives doesnt really do it for me, there must be away of accesing these dynamic disks in mandrake. Anyone got any advice? Im a complete beginner at linux and have no clue to this

The partitions on a dynamic disks should be deteced automatically by the kernel if the support is compiled in, and you should be able to mount them like you do with normal partitions.
If the kernel has support you should see messages like this in dmesg:
if not then you need to recompile your kernel, adding the support