I'm very new to Linux so all guidance is welcome.

I managed to install RH9 onto a 200MHz Pentium with a 3G hard disk and was very surprised at how well it works (maybe I shouldn't have been). It even networked first time to my ADSL router (Netgear 824M), using an old NE2000 ISA card - very impressed. As you would expect though it is very, very slow!

My main machine (self-built Athlon 2000+ on a Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra board) has an onboard Highpoint HPT372 RAID controller (IDE 3 & 4) striping two 60G drives using NTFS; it's already set up with 3 partitions, with Windows XP Home on the first.

What problems might I encounter if I try to install RH9 on the third partition? The XP installation must remain intact and functional. According to Highpoint, because the controller is onboard I can't use their HPT372 drivers, only those from Soyo; naturally, Soyo don't list any linux support. I suppose the other question to ask is whether I can install at all without affecting the XP installation?

There is also a further hard disk on IDE 1, with two partitions. Could I put RH9 there?

Also, my son has a slightly different situation; his Athlon 2200+ on a Gigabyte board has a Promise RAID controller striping two 60G drives using NTFS. This has only a single partition - will disk druid repartition it so that his XP installation remains untouched in a separate partition?

Thanks

John

I'll address the third part first and the first part third, getting around to the second bit sometime next week.

As far as using disk squisher to move around the single partition to free up some space, yes, its more then possible. Disk Druid is going to be working with a running kernel that is going to have been told that the RAID array is just a single scsi device, the card is going to take care of the hard part, the problem is getting an RH install that'll work with the card. The HPT 372 hasn't made it into the mainstream kernel yet, and the Highpoint drivers are finicky about working with onboard chipsets, although many people have just ignored Highpoint's warning, which is mostly CYA, and gone ahead and had a no problem install. There's very little chance of data corruption right off the bat, so you may just want to try the Highpoint drivers and see if RH gets to the install part and sees 1 device or 2... Most importantly though, there's a user here, named Sharky, who has been working on a sideways port of the hpt372/4 code to work with any given 2.4.x based install, just make a search by "HPT372" and you should find one of the two monstrous threads.

About your son's machine, which Promise controller? The PDC202?? A lot are supported, some aren't.

Cheers,

Finegan