I am running on a (sadly enough) Dell XPS system with an intel RAID controller (which has two 10,000 74GB? SATA drives on RAID 0) I have an external Seagate hard drive (connects via USB 2.0) that I have previously installed Mandrake 10.1 on. I now want to try to put a more suitable distrobution on the drive. I recently tried to put Fedora Core 4 on the drive, but mistakenly put the put loader (somehow) on the first hard drive inside the RAID array. This pretty much killed M$ Windoze and had to spend the entire night re-installing it (I would drop the OS the first chance I can get but other people use the computer ) My question is what distro is out there that can recognize the RAID array (so I dont mistakenly install on it instead of the external drive) and support the USB 2.0 hard drive. (I would like to use Debian or maybe slackware, but I am unfamilar with anything non-Red Hat based)

Just for the next time. Installing grub to the MBR of your windows disk doesn't kill windows. Just put in your windows CD boot it to Recovery console and run fixmbr command at the prompt. It should fix your MBR and let you boot your Windows again as before.

You could try slackware. My friend installed it on a raid, but needed some drivers though.

I did try to do the recovery process but it made no change at all to the problem. It probably did re-install a boot loader but as I said-- I have two drives in a RAID 0 array, GRUB was written to the master boot record on only one drive. Windoze thinks there is only one drive becuase of the hardware RAID card.