After surfing for several days for answer and several attempts to install various flavors of Linux, I have one very good question:
What distribution work with HPT374 out of the box? I mean, really works, without any extra shaman dances. And yes, I don't have another Linux anywhere to compile kernel, or whatever. Just W2K, which could burn downloaded CD images. And I use raid as a raid - I want to install Linux onto my RAID-0. From CD-ROM.
What I tried so far:
1. Mandrake 9.0, 9.1 beta 1, 9.1 beta 2 do not work at all (hang right after first <Enter>).
2. RedHat 8.0 works (sort of). It could see my disks, attached to HPT374, it just cannot see them as a RAID. But I was able to install RH8.0 on a single disk. It was _awfully_ slow. Anyway, this was not my goal - I want to install in onto harware RAID (just like windows

.
3. RedHat 8.1 beta broke my boot on windows RAID (and I have no idea how it managed to do it!). Luckily, I was able to recover.
4. So much advertized Source Mage gave me the most headache. On distrowatch.com it was said to have kernel 2.4.20, so I decided to give it a try. First of all, that distro had a CD image. Problem is, you cannot burn it from Windows to make it bootable. And from Linux too. The _only_ way to make it bootable is to use cdrecord. Hey, people, how someone supposed to install Linux for the first time if in order to do it he should already have Linux?!!
Amd I managed it only to figure out that in reality kernel was 2.4.19 (instead of 2.4.20).
5. Drivers available on HighPoint web-site simply do not work. I did _everything_ (to the letter) as they told in installation manual, but their driver (hpt374.o) was not loaded.
6. I gave up.
Is there _ANY_ distro that I could just take and install, so it will see my HPT374 RAID as a RAID and let me install on it? I agree to beta, developer or any other distro.
HELP!