Ok here is the deal. Computer has (2) 40 GB IDE ata hardrives that are hooked up master and slave to the motherboard. No special controllers or anything. I bought Suse Linux 10.0 and do not understand the file structure and have no experience of setting it up other than a basic default setup. I have not been able to find info on software raid that makes any sense to me. Does anyone know how to set the drives up so one drive is the primary and has Suse installed and the other just mirrors the other drive just in case of drive failure (Raid 1)? In the partition setup I deleted the generic setup (root and swap) and now I see hda1 and hda2. I see raid as an option on the bottom but don't know how to setup the drives so this will work. As far as setup just give me a beginner setup that would be common for this. Please be specific to Suse as I don't know linux very well and just slight variatons in linux will utterly confuse me. Thanks -Kyle

You should connect the drives as master to channel 1 and 2.

You have to partiton both drives exactly the same.

Then create a raid dor the two partition on the two drives.

Afterwards it is possible to format the drives.

partitioning:

1. boot ~100MB on both drives; *no raid*
2. swap 4/3 of Ram size (partiton on disk 1+disk2) *no raid*
3. root *raid*

I used this setup after I used a Raid 1 on the /boot.
My question is, what happens if the /boot partition on disk 1 crashes?
Definitely no fallback, so kind of a useless RAID 1 setup I guess.

Any comments on this?