I'm pretty lost at this point, I've read a scattering of tutorials and all sorts of things. I have this machine http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...SYXS-ST-989112 specifically, it's got the VIA P4M800/VT8237 chipset which through various searches has told me it's a fake hardware RAID and that I need to do a software RAID for my slack 10.2 (sata.i) build. So i followed these instructions http://slacksite.com/slackware/raid.html which seem to be fine, however when i got to the end where i needed to start from the other harddrive, my bios doesn't detect either harddrive and all i can do in selecting boot order is cd,floppy,harddrive.....no preference to which one. So that kinda ruined that, so i called the manufact and they told me it was a hardware raid. I tabbed into a bios type raid menu at startup that seems to say it's working, although i really don't believe it. b4 i formatted the second drive it was just an empty block not an exact duplicate of the first. because when I installed slackware it says raid wasn't working at startup, then i formatted the second drive to the 4 partitions that mirrored the first and when i restarted it, it said the raid was working at slackware startup, b4 i even changed them to a rieserfs. So i didn't really believe that either. then i continued with the steps and now i can't boot to the second harddrive to complete the switch of the first partition to a raid auto dectect type instead of linux type. I'm thinking perhaps the hardware raid might actually work and what i was reading was outdated, but I'm wondering if i should just start over again and just wipe them both out. If i do that, I'm not sure if I should use a linux or raid auto dectect (83/fd) type for all but my swap. I need a little guidance here. Sorry for the redundacy of the post type, just seems the information is so scattered and half outdated..

I had the same problem with a Soyo motherboard. These integrated RAID are not native. All these motherboards do is facilitate the CPU by performing some simple RAID functions such as copying from one drive to the other. The rest is done by the driver and the CPU.

Linux does not have modules for these motherboards because that is not needed anyway. Disable the RAID feature in your BIOS and just use the mdadm utility. After you disable RAID in the BIOS then you may be able to specify boot on the second drive in the BIOS, if the first drive is down.

As far as I know, all ide and sata raid is in reality software raid. The difference is that it is set up in bios.

Which raid are you using. If you use grub to start up, keep in mind that grub reads the individual drive device rather than the raid device during the boot process. So you can set it up to work with raid 1 using the Raid-grub howto on the TLDP.org website. You might also consider not using raid for the first partition and making it the boot partition. That way, you can boot up normally and still use software raid. You don't have a failover that you might get from raid 1 / grub, but you could have the contents of the second drive be an almost exact copy of the first one, except for the changes in menu.lst. I think that you could set up the second drive initially as the boot drive, run grub-install using that as the active boot device. Copy the contents to the first partition on the first drive and then set it up as your normal boot partition. That should cut down on the recovery time, however the /etc/fstab entry for /boot would be off.

Also consider a hybrid approach. You can set up the first partition(s) as raid-1 which will work with grub. You could use a different raid configuration for your other partitions then if you wanted to. With raid-1 for the boot partition, you will be able to load in the kernel and initrd files during boot. Here is a raid-1 grub howto at the gentoo wiki. The process describes preparing grub on both drives of the raid-1 array, and even setting things up so that if one drive fails, you get an e-mail.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_..._Software_RAID

It might be an idea during the initial setup to A) print out the wiki and keep it with the server; B) Label the drives themselves so you know which is which at a glance; C) and do a dry run of replacing one of the drives with a spare to verify that the process outlined works.

Good Luck!

Thanks RamRAm, that got me through enough to finish up my software raid aproach i was trying in the link of the tutorial I posted. I got it to work perfectly now, so thanks and cheers
J
Thanks for the reply jschiwal,

I'm not using grub, thanks for that advice though.....however your backup plan is a good idea, i think i might just have a role playing game of who's your harddrive. I apreciate your help sir...cheers

J