I've been using linux(Mandrake 9.2) for about a year or so now at school, and I'm finally ready to go 100% linux at home. But my only issue is my RAID drives. I've got 3 80gb Maxtor's. One is on the normal IDE port, and it's used for the OS only. The other two are on a striped RAID setup. (HPT-370 I believe) I have well over 150gb of data that I absolutely can not afford to risk losing upon installing linux/mounting/etc. My question is, once I get linux up and running on the first drive, how can I then mount the RAID drives(they are FAT32) without the risk of accidentally formatting them?
(In case it's relevant, the motherboard is an FIC AN19E.)

I can not think of any reason why this should be a problem. Linux won't "format" anything, unless you tell it to; have confidence in that.

You didn't say what type of raid you are running. I can only assume it is a hardware raid controller. For saftey sake, always have a physical backup of your criticial data. Don't think you can not loose it with raid, you can.

As far as mounting the drives, you will have to edit fstab and make the entries for each drive. There are abundant examples on this forum. Hope this gets you going.

Is this the right way to do it in fstab?
/dev/hda1 /mnt/raid
/dev/hda2 /mnt/raid

If not, would you mind providing me with a couple of links? Thanks.

There are two steps to mount the file system. You need to make the directory entry in your root file system. Then edit yoru fstab file, /etc/fstab. You have to edit it as root user.

Here are the two fat32 partitions I have mounted as an example.

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=000 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=000 0 0

The first field is the physical partition. The second field has to match the entry you make in the root file system. The third field is the type of file system; vfat should work for your fat32 file system.

You can get all the details by typing man fstab or man mount. Hope this helps.

Thanks much and if I wanted to mount them as one combined drive, it would be something like this:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_g vfat codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=000 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_g vfat codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=000 0 0

Right? I only ask because they are on a RAID-0, so I can't have them seperate...

/me hopes to not have just sounded like an idiot

If you have a proper RAID controller you should mount them as one single partition, i.e. /dev/md1 or whatever your RAID device is. Do not mount the partitions individually.


Håkan

mdcreate raid0 /dev/md0 /dev/hda3 hda4
mdadd
mdrun
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/RAID

Is this right?

I guessing from your last post you are asking how to make a directory. The command is mkdir. At a command prompt type man mkdir. The mount command will work, you shoun't need it if you correctly edit your fstab file. I'm not sure what those other commands? are. You may want ot have a look athttp://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Main_Page for help with various commands.

thezero, no. from memory, if you do that you will lose all of the data. that is to make a raid partition. not mount it.

if it's a pci raid controller, then it should only show up as one drive, since it's a raid 0 array.