Here's my story:

My C drive is partitioned, first half with Win2k, second half with Mandrake 9.

I've also got two other drives on a raid controller (Promise Fasttrack Lite, built onto Mobo - MSI) 2+0 stripe.

I can see my NTFS (win2k) partition from Mandrake, but my fat32 partition (w/ all my mp3's!) shows up as garbage and gives me a bunch of errors. See below:

[root@localhost windows]# ls
ls: ²«?þv.{.: No such file or directory
ls: è[e?¿t.ø/: No such file or directory
ls: /¦:ào¢x: No such file or directory
ls: ø/a`î2?: No such file or directory
ls: /¦:ào¢.î[: No such file or directory
ls: /¦:ào¢.ê\: No such file or directory
ls: /¦:ào¢.ñ^: No such file or directory
ls: /¦:ào¢.hv: No such file or directory
ls: /¦:ào¢.êw: No such file or directory
00??.fff* ào?¢$l.?õp* è[e?ós.:ý\* ñ??=(?-¢.lå* ù7??k¤~?.¹cå/
¹«??³z.?t3* ào?¢ñp.?kw* ëêpaæ6?4.ê8x/ nöð=´?ö8.?é* ú?!;?ä.´.}*
[$¹?d?.?«g* ào?¢óa.øv>* è[e? [.ßz4* ]^».?nr/ »?ù¢ì?ê/.*±?/
1q>¢?â.?æm* ào?¢¿o.å?u* eg6:õ???.?îô/ ?nrat¦??.pë}/ ¢uí;õ???.c?ö/
1q>¢?é.?àk* ào?¢õi.¨?k* ?ë?=j]7¢.êç* ?n?=®s??.?{*

Anyone know what's going on???
Here's my fstab:

/dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda7 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/nt ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hde1 /mnt/windows vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0

Please help me!

That on board RAID controller WILL NOT WORK with Mandrake 9.0 or any other version of Mandrake. There are drivers for older versions of Redhat, Suse and TurboLinux. I couldn't find them on the MSI website but this doesn't mean they don't exist.

CAUTION: DO NOT use these drivers for Mandrake, They do NOT work. I should know, I was dumb enough to try.

I'm sure by now you want to know WHY???

Promise on-board raid devices are NOT "true" RAID. The controller is good enough to "fool" windows into thinking you only have 1 drive but Linux is too smart and detects 2 seperate drives. They need to write more drivers so you can initialize the raid device at boot. Currently they only have drivers for limited Distros and Motherboard support. You probably won't be able to access any of the data on the Raided drives with Mandrake and unless you find drivers for your exact motherboard then you won't be able to access them at all with Linux.

You should probably not mount hde1 drive with Linux. If Linux writes to the raided drives you might loose some of your data. this is because the raid controller breaks up files into small blocks and spreads them onto BOTH raided drives to increase read/write performance. If linux does not understand how the raid controller is doing this then you will get data corruption if you try to write to either of the raided drives.

Whoa. Ok, I'll leave hde1 alone. Will also hunt for drivers for this raid chipset.

I guess I'll just format the raid for winders, and use more of my C drive for linux.

Thanks a bunch.

Ok, so if I remove the two lines in the fstab file which refer to these raid drives, will they "disappear" to linux?

Or is there a better way to make them invisible, so that I don't trash them accidentally?