Raid-Dual boot-Swap partition trouble

Hi,
I have been trying to set up dual boot of XP an Dapper over the last few days.
My system has Silicon Image (?) Raid0, striped SATA HDs, which is a whole problem in itself.
As an aside, I do hope we'll see some improvment on the Install programs handling on this (Raid HDs).

After much trouble I have ended up keeping my first partition as XP and a second primary partition following it with Ubuntu. My problem now is that the install program doesn't seem to find my swap inside the extended partition. It looks like I'll have to create the swap partition as a primary partition. Is this how it's supposed to be? Seemms very strange to me. Is it because of my striped raid?

Comments/suggestions welcome.

Mons

what is the output of

fdisk -l

Thanks binary_y2k2,
The output from fdisk -l gave partitions about sda and sdb. This got me thinking and i found posts about fakeRaid and the related HOWTO, here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto

Trouble is that the install program (Ubiquity?) doesn't work with Sata raid (and possibly other types of raids).
I have followed the instructions, but the install of dmraid fails. I try to run dpkg-reconfigure dmraid, but no luck. It says dmraid is broken.

Anyone have any ideas of how to configure dmraid when doing the install as described in the howto above? My raid is a Silicon Image 3112 on a asus A7N8X deluxe board.

You may want to try the alternative install CD, that has more options and (i'm quite sure) it has supprot for fakeRAID

I tried the alternative CD. It didn't see my RAID-0 configuration. only came up with 2 different drives (sda and sdb).
I have tried the manual process using the Linux Format DVD from their latest issue instead....

I managed to install dmraid. I only needed to install a package called 'checkpolicy'.
So I run: apt-get install checkpolicy
dmraid was then ok. I then installed grub to the partition where my ubuntu install is (no separate boot partition). I then created the ubuntu.bin file other dual boot howtos have mention for using windows bootloader. But when I now try to select Ubuntu linux from my windows boot menu, I only get a black screen. No error messages, nothing...

So I'm slightly further, but still no Ubuntu Dapper....

After one week with some late nights I finally managed to boot my new dual boot Ubunto-WinXP on my SATA RAID-0 machine (silicon image 3112 raid controller). I am using the Windows bootloader.



I started off using Partition Magic under windows to prepare a partition for root and boot and one for swap. I then booted the ubunto cd (well actually the Linux Format provided DVD in my case).
After much booting and rebooting and reading what seemed like hundreds of web pages (and accidentally reformatting the wrong partition and loosing my windows programs I had on a seperate partition), I enventually got started on the FakeRaidHowto.

What confused me to start with was that I had to use the mapper device, i.e. /dev/mapper/sil_afafejbgajdg in my case. There is no conventional device to use. The /dev/sda and /dev/sdb points to the individual striped harddrives and should NOT be used anywhere.

The FakRaidHowto on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto
Mentions the warnings you get about locale. You can generate the missing locale with the locale-gen command if you like, but it's not critical.
The other thing I had to do was to install the checkpolicy package to be able to successfully install dmraid.

The last problem was the grub installation. In order to be able to create the .bin file for the windows bootloader:
dd if=/dev/mapper/sil_afafejbgajdg of=/mnt/floppy/ubuntu/bin bs=512 count=1
I had to install grub to the MBR first. I then created the .bin file as above. I forgot at first that you have to use the main harddisk device and not the partition you are booting from (I have my ubuntu boot on /dev/mapper/sil_afafejbgajdg2).
Ones the file is on the floppy I unmounted and rebooted into the WinXP install DVD and run the FIXMBR command from the repair console. Then booted into Windows and set up the boot.ini as other people have described.

So after that it booted, although with the little error 15 message. I guess it's just for me to remove "savedefault" from menu.lst. Then I presume I will have to install nvidia graphics drivers before I get my nice gui up and running....

And maybe I'll try to undo that accidental format of my windows software too.

Mons

Just one last post on this.

I was back from holiday and managed to fix the last few problems on this installation. Removing the "savedefault" from menu.lst got rid of the error 15 message. Unfortunately root booted to read-only mode still.

There was 2 changes to fix that in my case.
One was to edit device.map file under /boot/grub
This file contained the devices, so in addition to the floppy on fd0, it listed my 2 hard drives as sda and sdb. Since I am using Raid-0, this is is wrong. I removed them and put in my mapper device instead (/dev/mapper/sil_afafejbgajdg).

I also edited my fstab file and changed the root entry. I removed all the parameters and just left the defaults one (so something like "/dev/mapper/sil_afafejbgajdg2 / ext3 defaults 0 1"). I guess it would be an idea to look into these mount options and try to find out what the ideal ones would be later.

Boot worked and went to rw mode! Last bit was to add a user and edit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf-customto add "AllowRoot=true" under the security section in order to allow root to login to gnome.

So thats finally it. Hope this thread is useful to someone out there...

Mons