Ok I have gotten some help and I've decided to go with Mandrake 9.2 if I can. I need a dual boot arrangement with WindowsXP Pro which is already installed.

However I was warned about possible problems with my multiple disk arrangement namely a promise raid with two physical drives attached. Here's the details I think are correct.

Physical Hard Drives:
Maxtor 60GB 7200RPM ATA-133 x 2

RAID Arrangement:
Reported in Devices under SCSI and RAID controllers as WinXP Promise Fasttrak100 TX2/TX4(tm) Controller

In Disk Drives it says: Promise 2+0 Stripe/RAID0 SCSI disk device.

Is installing the dual boot Linux going to be difficult with this and more importantly will it stop my ability to boot to WinXP if it has trouble, particularly with the RAID arrangement? Is there any help you can give on what to do in case something weird happens?

I'm not an expert but I've got myself a Raid partition and linux doesn't see it at all.In fact when I installed RH9, it wanted to format it. From what I understood linux and windows don't format RAID the same way hence they're not compatible.

I might be wrong but I'm not sure u can do that.

good luck anyway.

Thanks for the reply. It's certainly starting to seem that way.

Suse detects my raid 0 and all its partitions..but i can't fully install suse at the moment cause of some other reason.