Hi, I'm completely new to linux, just installed Mandrake 10.1 a few days ago.

It happened as I expected, my RAID-0 disks are inaccessible. It's a Promise Fasttrack TX2000 by the way.
With Knoppix 3.7, I can use RAID when using kernel 2.4, but not with kernel 2.6.

This also means my bootloader doesn't properly work, since my windows boot partition is on that RAID array, which is invisible to linux.

Promise only offers drivers for Mandrakle 9, I tried them out but the installer just complains about disliking my kernel and refuses to play with it.
The driver is also available as partly open source, but I have not the slightest clue what to do with that file, and the included readme isn't written with newbies in mind. I tried to follow the instructions but miserably failed. I could post the content of the readme if anybody cares.

I hardcore-googled for days now but without luck.
I have found dmraid, a program which claims to be able to make the fasttrack array usable.
Of course it only tells me "no software RAID disks", whatever command I use. Great.

I also found a slight hint that it *might* (mightmightmight) work with debian -sarge, but I won't go through all the hassle of downloading and installing debian as long as I ain't sure that it guarantees success. I'm also a bit scared of debian since I already have my troubles in finding my way around Mandrake and I'm very thankful for all the graphical frontends for configuring and installing.




Sooo..... What do you think? Should I forget about my RAID disks, it will never work? Install Debian?
Anyone can help me setting it up in Mandrake?

I'm looking for a solution for this same problem as well.

Has this been resolved? I have a Notebook with the Promise Fasttrack PDC20265 and cannot install Linux if the RAID is enabled.

no sorry so far no luck.

I've got it running on with the Promise Fastrak driver for Suse 9.1. Needed to buy a usb floppy to load the image on installation boot. Damn proprietary drivers suck!

Ps> Fastrak driver not compatible with Suse 9.2...don't waste your time.

Promise as far as I know has no support for the 2.6.x kernels (even though they promised such over half a year ago...). You could either compile a 2.4.x kernel and their driver source code that they give and try that, or you could recompile a 2.6.x kernel to have promise software raid support.

The issue with going the 2.6.x route would be that you're only going to be able to access the raid drives in linux. Long story short, hate promise, I know I do.

Try Slackware 10.1. It will use the 2.4 kernel and has the drivers included. I have a MSI 694d motherboard, with dual 1 gigs and the promise fastrack lite onboard raid controller, what a pain to install Linux on as you have probably already found out with all promise controllers. Slackware does not have all the bells and whistles of Mandrake, but it is straight forward and easy to install and one of the most stable versions of any linux I've tried. I gave up on the 2.6 kernels, it does not,(that I know of) have support for the older IDE type software raids, only the sata's.

i go with dmraid now, works well for me. though i havn't tested read/write access yet, the author writes dmraid is still alpha and one should test it closely in read-only mode with one's hardware before trying write access. I'm unsure if it supports anything else than raid-0 yet though.