I'm a Linux newbie- I've installed it ages ago on an old computer to mess around with. Anyway, I now wish to dual boot Linux Mandrake 10.0 with Windows XP Professional (SP2.)

Here's the problem. I have 2 Seagate Barracudas (200GB, 7200RPM, 8MB cache) in SATA RAID 0. My motherboard is a
MSI K8N Neo Platinum and the RAID controller is whatever the one NForce 3 uses, nvRaid I believe. I want to make another partition, say, 25GB, and load Linux Mandrake onto that. To partition I have a copy of PartitionMagic 8.0.

However, I have read that Linux support of fake raid is very poor, so I've decided to ask here how I can install Linux and get it working with SATA RAID without destroying all my data. (20GB of irreplaceable files- I really need an external HDD for backups.) I assume I will need drivers, as the Windows install needed them to see the drives. Are there drivers I can use or something? I do not want to do anything that will affect my Windows partition. Guides to dual booting Windows and Linux on SATA RAID 0? Any help will be much appreciated, thanks.

When you are talking about "fake" RAID do you mean software RAID? I have heard this is slow. However I believe what you have is hardware raid (as it is a feature of your motherboard). You might want to look up whether Linux supports your particular raid controller.