I have two hard drives, and a RAID controller so they act as one hard drive. I have set up 50% of the hard drive to use windows xp, so I used that and installed windows, but windows was not detecting my hard drives. I asked around, and i found out that I needed a disk with my BIOS drivers on it for my RAID controller. After that I installed mandrakelinux 10.1 and it seemed to install perfectly. I have an 80gb hard drive and 768MB RAM, and I was told to set up custom partitions in the install:

768MB /swap
15GB /
everything else /home

I installed the boot loader on the first sector of the MBR, like many have said to do, and then when I boot up, after the BIOS boots, I get "L 01 01 01 01 01". I've been told this is an error with LILO, but I can't figure out how to access the file to figure it out. I was thinking, could it possibly be a RAID problem? Windows XP gave me trouble with the RAID setup, so I thought maybe linux did too. As of now I am downloading Knoppix because someone recommended it to me to diagnose my problem with mandrake. Is there any way to get around the "L 01 01 01" error?

Also, I used the rescue mode, and tried reinstalling the bootloader, and still got the same error, and then I tried restoring the windows bootloader, but when I rebooted, I would get nothing but a black screen after the BIOS loaded. Can someone please help? This is driving me nuts!

Also, please keep in mind I'm a _complete_ newbie to Linux, so please explain any commands in full.

Thank you so much!

I don't have a solution for you, just some information that may or may not help.

Windows is not friendly to dual boot: If you already have an operating system installed, it writes over the MBR, and prevents the other operating system from being booted. The trick is to install Windows first. When I do this and install any of the versions of Redhat or Fedora, the GRUB boot loader is installed, and provides for booting either Windows or Linux. I imagine that Mandrake works the same way.

Redhat is phasing out LILO in favor of GRUB. What about Mandrake?

My guess is that you should get the Windows system working first, back it up, and then install Linux from scratch. Windows has a tool on the installation CD for restoring the MBR. You might be able to get Windows running again by using this tool instead of re-installing, but you would still have to re-install Linux.

I am running Fedora Core 3, and it supports SATA drives. Probably Mandarke does too, but you should check. Also, you should check if Mandrake supports the specific drives that you have. I can't imagine that Windows XP would fail to support any SATA drive out there, but you should make sure that your motherboard supports SATA, and you might have to do some hardware, BIOS, drive, and driver configuration to get it running.

You should be doing a graphical install of Linux, and should not need to enter any commands during the install or to boot Windows or Linux after the install. If you wanted to fix a configuration problem after you have both Windows and Linux running you might need to learn some commands, but until then, you should just blindly but carefully follow the instructions for installing. If something goes wrong at this point, your best bet is to start over, taking careful notes of your hardware, the operating systems you are trying to install, what you did, and what happened. Then you can provide this information when you ask again here, and have a better chance that someone can help.

Well that's what I did, I installed windows XP first, and everything worked just fine, so then I tried installing mandrakelinux on the other unpartitioned part of the drive, and allocated the space accordingly, and then when I boot I get the L 01 01 01 error. I am almost certain it has something to do with RAID messing around with my hard drives. Is there a way to disable RAID0?

OK guys lets give a little lesson here...

Dual booting (Linux - Mandrake and XP) - first of all whether you have RAID or not is no difference except in the drivers you need to see the drives. Other wise as far as the OS is concerned it looks the same as any other drive, and it is written to the same ..the controller does all of the work for RAID.

You will need three partitions
1 for the Win XP
1 for the Mandrake SWAP file
1 for the Mandrake

XP will only boot from C drive - I believe nothing has changed with Windows here .. and it needs to boot in the under 2GB area...(I heard rumours this is no longer the case - but I never do it since windows can be finicky with no tweaks.)

Mandrake Depends on the version as to whether it will boot if it is placed above 2GB - please check your version and see if it is possible to boot if placed in the over 2GB range.

IN Mandrake - you should get the choice to use GRUB instead of LILO - I use GRUB ..it is so much better - and documented QUITE WELL... there are also many sites that describe boot loaders - these should definitely be looked at and read .. they will help you understand the process.

My guess is you are beyond the Bootable boundary... of 2GB ...

Verify your Raid hardware is compatible with Mandrake ... then install XP first (the gentlemen that said to make a backup - well you cannot use Ghost to do it - it doesn't support RAID.) There are others that do ...

The point TOM F made about SATA drives - Is he assuming you are using SATA or did you have a private discussion - they can be SCSI drives.. but eiother way it doesn't matter ...as LONG as you have DRIVER support in both OpSYStems you should be fine...

Cheers

I have the exact same setup on my computer, and i had a similar problem.
when you go through the installation of Mandrake, one of the steps asks where to put the bootloader. at first, i put it in the first sector of the root partition. when i booted under this configuration, the screen just filled up with "09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09....."
I went back and reinstalled, and the only thing i changed was putting the bootloader in the first sector of hard disk, and it booted up just fine after that.

hope that helps

I got it working finally! I just decided it was too much work dealing with RAID, so I unplugged my hard drives from the RAID controller and put them in the normal IDE controller, and after that everything worked well.