I have two 250GB drives doing raid 0 and I have Vista installed and I am now trying to dual boot with Deb5.

First troubles occurred when I got a Debian 5 disc and my system would not start the boot loader (got message: No emulation type- 00)

BTW: I am running on an i7 quad core system and I downloaded the ia64 ISO from Debian.org. This is correct for my system, no? My cpu is not i386 so I thought ia64 was the correct choice. I mention this because I assume it could be a/the problem.

Next I tried my old Debian 4 disc and it booted and I started the installation process fine, but when it came to disk partitioning, etc, Debian only saw my two individual drives rather than the single raid0 partition. I do not know if there are drivers I need to load for this or what the process is. I did google around but I didn't find anything helpful.

I have to go to work but will be back in 7.5 hours and any help is appreciated.

Thanks

No, ia64 is Itanium. You want amd64; the "amd" part is a misnomer and perhaps should better be called x86_64.

Is the RAID hardware or software? If hardware, Linux will see the exact same thing Windows sees. If software.. I don't think it works like that.

You probably need dmraid; grub can boot a raid0 firmware raid set. This might be a starting point

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/SataRaid

Ubuntu has more extensive help

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto

oh thanks man!! Yeah I used to use amd64 with my old Athlon which is probably why Debian4 booted up and the ia64 did not. I read it was for Itanium but then there where other things that made me think it was right. They should really throw in the x86 part.

And the raid0 is controlled by the raid chipset and unless the OS I am installing has drivers for it then I would have to install them manually before proceeding.

Mostlyharmless: thanks for your input too. If the D5 install doesnt see the drives properly I will try that rout.