Mandrake and hard drive trouble.
 

Ok, so i purchased mandrake 10.1, and installed it on 1 hard drive, a 74GB sata raptor, it works fine, boots up and everything. I then decided that i needed more space, so i purchased two 250GB hard drives to set up in a RAID1 (mirrored).
I entered into the BIOS, and set up the hard drives so that the 74GB was a standalone, and the 250GB was mirrored. I reboot, and on startup, it shows that the hard drives are mirrored properly, then when it tries to start up mandrake, it shows the following error:
Kernel Panic: no init found...
It also shows that the original 74GB hard drive, which was labled as sda is now labled as sdb, and 2 250GB hard drives are showing up (labled sda and sdc). I tried again without the 2 250GB hard drives, and mandrake started up just fine.

So, my 2 questions are;
1) How do i get the operating system to boot with all hard drives connected, even if its no in a mirrored array,
2) Why are the 2 250GB drives showing up seperatley as sda and sdc, should they not show up as one drive as it is suggested in the bios. And if so how do i correct this problem.

Thanx for all the help
-spitfire999-

May not be related but I have read where people are having trouble with the large drives. This may be what your problem is. You may want to try spliting it into thirds, something the size of the original partition you already have, then see if it works then. If it does then at least you know it is not likely hardware but software/OS related. If it don't, shoot it. lol

I have no idea why it happens just that I have read about. I have 80GB drives for that reason. Wish I did have a *big one* though.

Later

:D :D :D :D

PS: BUMP

If your 74GB hard drive has changed from sda to sdb, your boot loader cannot find it anymore. To correct this problem, you need to reinstall the boot loader. You can do this with the mandrake boot CD. After you have rebooted, press F1 to get more options and then choose repair or reinstall boot-loader or something like that. I don't remember exactly.

Hope this helps

hmmm, do you know why you need more space but then choose to raid your new drives?

um, raid is best for business types that have a fear of hard drive failure, us mere mortals can just use backups to cdr or to a spare hard drive?

(2) bios enabled raid is hardware raid .......software is the other option and your mention of sda etc is meaningless unless you can state what ide controllers they are on and their jumpers

sda is controller 1 as master
sdb is its slave

sdc is controller 2 as master etc

how does this sit with what the cables and jumpers are telling you?

ps to be blunt......stop using raid and enjoy the extra drives