Install Help with Highpoint RAID 372
 

Uhm... Hi.

I've been a heavy Windows user all my life pretty much, and except my experience with Mandrake 8.0 a few years back I don't have much advanced knowledge of Linux installation.

I downloaded Slack 8.1 when it came out, and I could never get it in stall properly because of my integrated Highpoint RAID 372 in my Soyo KT333 Platinum mobo. I dropped Slack for a while, and now I'm trying to come back with version 9.1. Same problems, so I'm coming here, a broken and shattered man (I guess).

My problem is this: I'm trying to install Slack on my RAID 0 setup. I've got 4 Maxtor 40GB 7200's set up as two striped drives at 80GBs each. Winders is on the first pair (Drive "C:"), and my downloads/games/etc are on the second pair (Drive "G:"). A while back I grabbed partition magic and slapped a Linux and Linux swap partition of about 10 Gigs at the end of "G:", and now I be wantin' to get Slack on d'ere.

Now (to me) it gets ugly. Bear in mind I'm pulling this from memory, if you need ANY more specifics just ask. I CD boot Slack, load raid.s (install manual says dis supports my controller, I _think_) "try" cfdisk (no dice), "try" fdisk, and all I see is headaches embodied as all four drives and partitions detected fine, but not as an array or anything special like that. I try running setup, it detects my swap partition, but just hangs on the "checking for bad whatevers" dialog. I alt-catarl-delete and some read/write errors pop up before it shuts down. Pretty much the same thing happens when I try to do the actual installing of packages, except that when I actually get to the installing it finishes immeadiatly and says "installation complete" when nothing has happened.

Whew, thats my problem. In a nutshell, I have a RAID 0 array, and I'm not sure how to install on it. In the HOWTO docs, the "these devices (RAID controllers) may require some before and after setup to get working" line keeps bugging me, as I have little knowledge of this mystery setup and believe mounting is something that should be left to canines and legs.

Thankyou for your time, NOW HELP Mee! Please.