Apologies for my lack of knowledge in advance -

I have a Dell machine(AMD Turion chip) with "RAID 0". (unsure if it is hardware or software); But even if i format both drives, i still end up with 10Gb less on each drive.)
I have tried installing Ubuntu 9.10 & 10.** as well as Vector Linux.

Unfortunately i lack the expertise to configure RAID manually & allow linux to boot. ( I did try for 2 days ).

Is there a desktop version of linux that will configure RAID automatically ?
If not, maybe an idiots guide might help.

Ideally i'd like to have my machine dual boot with Vista(even though i hate it.) But atleast that way i'll have something to fall back on if something goes wrong.

Kind Regards.

How big are the drives? You always lose a little bit of the drives when formatting. My 500 GB drive is showing 465GB.

It sounds as though you have hardware raid unless you have set software raid in Ubuntu?

If you watch the boot up of your PC closely just after the bios there should be a raid manager option or something like that.