Hi! I'm not a newbie to computers, but a newbie to linux.

I have an ABIT TH7-II-RAID which I upgraded to latest BIOS. It includes the Hightpoint HPT370A raid controller, on which I have two 40GB drives in a RAID 0 (one on each channel).

I have Windows XP already installed on there and I would like to try Linux. I downloaded RedHat 8.0. Using PArtition MAgic 7.0, I left 10GB of free room (unpartitioned space) to allow Red Hat to install there.

I also have two CDROM's (a 52X and a CD-RW). They are installed on the regular IDE controller (one master and one slave on the same channel).

I boot off the Redhat 8.0 CD. It seems to recognize everything (it mentions the HPT370 controllers, and seems to see the hard drives on them).

I go through the install. At the point it wants me to partition, it gives me three choices, auto, and two manual choices (either a GUI or text based partitioning program). I didn't try the automatic one (since I have XP and don't want to risk it blowing it away), but on either of the manual ones, it says that it doesn't recognize the partition table on each drive. It says this separately for each one, kind of like it doesn't recognize the drives are on a RAID 0 (since they are one huge 80GB logical drive, I would think if it saw it correctly, it would only say that once).

Anyway the options it has are either to wipe out the drive's partition table or not use it. Since I don't want to wipe out XP, and since I'm not sure it actualy sees it as a RAID 0, I can't choose for it to wipe it out. If I choose not to use it for each drive, then Red Hat stops the install saying no drives found to install, and reboots.

I went to highpoint's website, and it said the bios on the raid controller had to be version 2.1 to install Linux. the Bios on the contorller is 2.0XXX, which I am guessing is the problem. However ABIT doesn't offer a newer bios level for the controller, and Highpoint says to use the bios from the motherboard manufacturer, not them if the contorller is on the motherboard.

Any ideas? Or am I out of luck?