Downloaded FC4 and it reads the hard drives!! I'm happy. But it still won't install, gave me an error saying it can't format the drives and terminates the install. I figure i'll do a fresh install of XP and then try FC4 again. May use Knoppix, seei f it can read the drives and if so format that way.

Did you manually partition (with Disk Druid) and remove the LVM structure? Otherwise, it will throw up a python(?) stack trace about how it can't create the Logical Volume Group(?) and terminate. The default settings will not work. I don't know if this is particular to our machines or a general problem with LVM (although, I don't think there was a problem with it on my old desktop machine).

Hi All,

Great thread! (...if you have this Alienware laptop!)

I've just got mine and am getting ready to install linux on it. Did anyone manage to just resize (shrink) the existing windows partition and then install linux on the freshly available space?

This can normally be done with QTParted, say using knoppix or such. But, this would mean that the live distro you are booting would need to support the raid card and let you look at the windows partition. Anyone managed to do this?

What I want to do is keep the existing windows setup and dual boot to a new linux install, all on the one raid device. (I have two 60Gb HDDs in Raid 0).

Cheers and thanks for any help.

-> Proud owner of a new Alienware Area-51m 7700

Originally, I resized the windows partition using the statically-linked ntfsresize at http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/. The one I used was version 1.9.4, but is no longer available. Newer ones should work (e.g., 1.11.2). I did this by typing "linux rescue" at the Fedora Core boot prompt. This is the only way I know of getting a Linux prompt that recognizes the drive controller, and it should work "out of the box" for Fedora Core 4. Doing this worked fine for me, and I had a dual-boot machine for some time.

I think the main problem you will have is coaxing Linux to recognize the particular Raid setup you have. I am, by no means, an expert on running Raid on Linux, but I've gotten the impression that the hardware Raid that the drive controller performs may be different from the software Raid that Linux can perform, and so you may not be able to see the windows partition in order to resize it. Also, I'm not sure how to accomplish the Fedora installation on a Raid array