I have an Asus A8V Deluxe mobo, with Nforce4 Raid, and 2 x 250gb disks attached in a soft RAID 0 array...

Now, I did have a very successful Slackware 11.0 install, but due to wanting to try the 2.6 kernel started to play....

Installed 12.0 OK, then tried to get EasyBCD to pick up the partition...did not work. Peeled off the bootsector using dd and manually updated using BCDEDIT.... L99 99 99 99 ...that old chestnut.

Anyway, bigger problems come my way as I discovered that most of my hard disk was knackered....most of the binary files unreadable etc....OK though, as most of it is backed up, or is on various computers.

It was suggested that I clear my MBR using dd, which I did. But then when I looked at the disk in fdisk I noticed that it only reported one disk.....not the array.

Now, my first question is...would an installation (that went well I might add and could boot from CD) cause all the hard disk corruption I have? I hope so, as otherwise I cannot explain my disaster...(would make it better if I could at least attribute it to something).

Secondly, how the hell did I get Slackware 11.0 on in the first place?

And how do I proceed now? I am totally confused...

Any help much appreciated,

Thanks,

Mark

Now I did have this booting, so what image did I use to install....I know it was a 2.4 kernel....

I am currently downloading Ubuntu and Gentoo CD's to see if those detect the array out of the box....

OK, I got Gentoo and Ubuntu. Ubuntu did not seem to pick it up, but Gentoo did using dmraid, by invoking the dodmraid ('do' dmraid)

There is a how to on the gentoo wiki, which is mostly handraulic, and ideally I want to try and find out how to use dmraid with Slackware....

Any ideas?

I have a similar Asus mobo (A7N8X Delux) and a raid 0. I have followed that Gentoo wiki howto, and can manage to boot. My root is on an LVM2 partition, but my /home is on a dmraid (with one of those /dev/mapper/sil_xxxxx device files). Currently I am having problems seeing the /home partition. dmraid starts and recognise the partitions but somehow it doesn't hook up so I can mount them (mount gives some "device does not exist" message).

I suspect it is a problem with my initrd, but I'm not sure. I had Fedora before, and its installer found the raid-0 setup itself. I just thought I'd try Gentoo this time, more work, but hopefully faster when I eventually get it to work....