I have a promise PDC 20376 RAID chip on my asus motherboard. I have 2 seagate 120G drives. These two drives are setup with windows 2000 with several partitions. My question is can I install linux on this drive without destroying all of the windows partitions on it. I would like to install linux on the last partition of my existing array without killing windows.

I know for a fact you can do it with :

mount -t smbfs //ComputerName/Share

What file systems are they formatted with? As long as theyre identifiable and formatted with a common file system (ntfs and the like), no reason why you can't get this done.

It's nice to know that I can do this, but how do I install Mandrake 9.2 on the last partition. All partitions are formatted NTFS. I need a step by step guide being a newbie. Sorry to be a pain.

Just use the last partition and have it mounted as "/". I'm not asking this to put you on the defensive (because I realize everyone started at zero), but have you ever installed an operating system before?

I don't think that Rootyard understood the question. He gave a mount point for accessing the win2000 computer from a seperate linux computer.

You will need to download the driver from www.promise.com.

Unfortunately, they don't keep there drivers very up to date. For the Fastrack drivers, they support the drivers for the kernel from Mandrake 9.0. There is a partial source that you can compile, however, this may not work if you have a 2.6 kernel.

You may be better of purchasing a drive for linux and using the NT loader to boot into either Win200 or Linux.

jschiwal thanks for your help.

As suggested I decided that to save me some stress (hopefully) I would install an old 6G IDE drive and after some hair pulling managed to get it to work and loaded linux on it which from installing a couple of times before seemed to install okay. However because linux did not recognize my RAID array a boot loader was not installed. So at the moment when I boot my system I get windows 2000 with no option to load linux. It is possible I could change the boot order in the bios, but this is not an ideal fix.

jschiwal you mention using a NT loader is this possible to load manually on my windows RAID partition for C drive?

Rootyard thanks for your help also. Just to give you some idea of my experience I have installed windows numbers of times and I am the person my family and friends rely on to assist them with computer problems, hardware and software installations. Also I have some limited experience with earlier versions of linux when I did my Ass Dip of Inf Tech. Not boasting! I have not taken offense :-)

jschiwal I did see the drivers on the promise site I am not sure which I should use. I also don't have a working linux machine so compiling the driver is difficult. Also the concept of compiling the driver is a bit daunting having never done this in linux before. I would love to learn how to do it just need a little help. How do I know what kernel I am using?

If you want to your RAID array for LINUX and still keep Windows, make a backup first. Then run a program like Partition Magic and adjust the partition to a good size for LINUX. Do not format it. Then you are ready to install LINUX. I do not know what will Partition Magic will do to RAID, so making a backup is good idea.

In Windows or LINUX the installer saids. Do you have any SCSI controllers. Your Promise controller is consider as SCSI by the installer. Answer yes and insert floppy that has the modules (drivers) in the disk drive. The installer should find modules (drivers) for your controller.

Google for the terms NT Lilo Boot Howto. There will be several HOWTOs listed giving full instructions. What you would do is select the linux drive to install the lilo linux loader, copy the first 256 bytes to a file on floppy, then in windows copy the file to the c:\ drive. Adding a line to c:\boot.ini will give you a menu option to boot into linux.

Originally, I was able to compile the promise driver, and after linux booted up, I could read the RAID NTFS files on the windows drive. But since upgrading my kernel, the drivers will not compile.