SuSe 10 + GRUB + RAID1 questions
 

Hello,

My current setup:

nForce3 equipped motherboard with 2 SATA HDD's running in RAID1 (mirroring) using onboard (soft?) nForce3 RAID controller. Windows XP is installed on this drive (C:-drive in XP)

One single PATA drive intented for my SuSe 10 install (G:-drive when running XP).

When I start the SuSe 10 install SuSe tells me that it found two HDD's (SDA and SDB) which are part of a software RAID. Installing SuSe on these drives will destroy all data on the drives.

No problem for me I guess because I'm planning to install linux on the detected HDA (my single PATA) drive.

SuSe suggests to put the GRUB bootloader on a partition on de HDA drive (HDA3 i think), and since it treats my RAID1 as two individual drives (SDA and SDB) it will mount these drives as Windows1 and Windows2...

My Questions:

- Will I still be able to boot my WinXP from within GRUB? And which entry will I need to select to boot WinXP? Windows1 or Windows2?

- Will SuSe damage my RAID1 when it mounts and treats the two drives ad seperate drives? I guess they will no longer be a mirror when I write a file from within SuSe to either SDA or SDB?

- Is there a way to let SuSe handle these two drives as a ONE drive (RAID1), like WinXP does?

Thanks for your answers!

Tim.

Since I'm new to Linux, and new to this website... could it be that I've posted my question in the wrong forum-group?

1. As I know, Grub is unable to boot a raid ntfs partition.
2. You should not try to write a ntfs partition.
3. If you want to use a Raid for Linux: it will work.

Ouch! That's very bad news for me... Will LILO be able to boot NTFS partitions?

If LILO is also unable to boot WinXP/NTFS I guess my only option is to convert the NTFS partition to FAT32 using Partition Magic?

But it is possible to use the windows xp bootloader to boot grub.

Is it possible to move this thread to "Linux general"? Since some of my questions are general linux questions and I need an answer to them before I start my Linux adventure: don't wan't to loose any data.