ok, so I'm running ubuntu 7.10, and am using an NF4 chipset
I boot live from the CD
Install the dmraid package
go into the command line and type
sudo dmraid -ay
this activates the array right?
when I enter the command
dmraid -r
I see the following

/dev/sda: nvidia, "nvidia_enhhcaddf", stripe, ok, 39297086 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdb: nvidia, "nvidia_enhhcaddf", stripe, ok, 39297086 sectors, data@ 0

so this means that it's detecting the array right?

basically, I'm at a loss as to what I need to do after this. When I try to install ubuntu after this has been done, I get to the partitioning stage and it still sees the two hard drives as seperate.

I tried to FDISK but I'm totally new to linux and it's a little complicated

any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

If you have enabled the RAID0 in the BIOS, disable it. On-board RAID us almost always a fake RAID. Linux software RAID works out faster anyway. Then check out the following howto:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

You should also ask why you want RAID0 - the failure rate is higher and there's no parity. Usually, RAID0 is used to achieve higher speeds for network games.

Well, I have two identical 200 gig hard drives, and I didn't want to have 150 gigs for stuff on one, and 199 gigs for stuff on the other, I just wanted to combine them. That's my main reason.


basically, I just didn't want to seperate my data like that

But if any of the data is critical, and you have a failure with one of the drives, you will lose all the date. So keep good backups of the critical data.

yeah I know, thanks for the heads up though


I might just give up on the raid for now, since I'm new to this. I should concentrate on getting my sound card to works

You just want one big drive to stick stuff on? Investigate LVM. Slower than RAID0 but safer and more versatile.

You want safer RAID with two drives - I think that's RAID1, but you don't got extra storage space.

Splitting your files across drives is what RAID is doing anyway. If your data orders naturally, you'll want to consider this. I knew a guy with 200Gigs of mpegs ... created a /movies partition on a spare drive. Also, if you put your swap partition on a different drive to your root partition, your system will be faster.

Another approach I've seen is to have one drive for OSs (multiboot environment) and another drive for /home (common to most of the OSs).

well this is how I setup without the raid

os partition on the firs drive then a partition for stuff
swap partition on the second drive then a partition for stuff



I'll look into LVM