I am about to install linux for the first time (decided to go with Mandrake 10) and I have a few concerns about the installation procedure. The concerns mainly revolve around my SATA RAID 0 setup which has WinXP on it. I plan on putting in an extra PATA drive just for linux because I can't seem to find any linux RAID support for the ICH5R controller. My questions are as follows:

- Would installation be straightforward seeing as though I am putting linux on a totally separate physical drive from the RAID array?

- Would WinXP be detected from the RAID drives upon installation of Mandrake, or would it have trouble reading the array and therefore think that WinXP is not even there?

- What then would I have to do about dual booting the two OS's?

- Should it matter that the partitions on the RAID array are all in NTFS?

I hope my questions and clear enough, here is some information about
my system:

- P4 3.2 Ghz
- P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard
- 512Mb ram
- 2x 80Gb WD sata drives in RAID 0 (with WinXP installed)
- Extra pata hard drive to be purchased solely for linux

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Be careful .I had my windows xp boot loader screwed up by mandrake 10.I have heard others having this problem.If u r a newbie,i would not recommend u to try mandrake 10 as of now,coz it is known to have some issues with windows xp.

Thanks for your reply Pat. So you're saying then that the issues would most likely still arise even if I install Mandrake on a separate hard drive to WinXP? I would have thought that it would make installation easier by having them on separate drives. Can anyone recommend another distro that would give a fairly smooth installation given my setup?

Hi,

This seems weird to me, because I was having both Windows XP and Mandrake together, until I freed my machine from windows!
All I can say is that, while installation any distro, do take care that the partition on with oyur windows is installed is not edited in any way.
Or else you always have the option to try out other Linux distro, SuSE is a gud one to begin with, otherwise Fedora Core is always there .

All the Best.

enjoy!

I tried installing mandrake 10 with windows xp and it screwed my windows loader,but then i was installing it on the same hard drive.Perhaps,installing it in two different drives will not create the same problem.All the best.

I don't dual boot, but I used mandrake ce and 10 for a while. All you really need to do is be sensitive with the syntax. You need to know what you need for your dual HDD. You should be able to find some documentation on this. -Just remember, if your situation is different from other peoples it will need to be installed differently, not that much but enough. -So as long as you pay attention to what all the options are in the install program you should be fine...