Linux help please

[Nosferatu]

I am trying to dual boot with Win 98se and Linux cannot figure out the partitions. Basically it says the [artitiopns are so hosed that the choice of scrubbing and delting my current OS is recommended

here is my setup

Asus A7V-133

RAID 0
Primary Master 20 gig
Primary Slave Nothing

Secondary Master 20 gig
Seondary Slave Nothing

regular eide
Primary master nothing
primary slave cdrom

3 partitions of 12 gig each
first 2 are for win 98 and the last one is for linux

I am trying to use Mandrake 8.2

any ideas?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Are you trying to setup linux on a raid 0 partition? What raid card are you using? I hope its a decent one.

Why not get rid of that kludge and install it on a regular hard drive, or an older computer?

 

[Nosferatu]

The raid is 0
The raid is the onboard on the A7V133
(Promise Light I believe)
To be honest my slowest computer is so pokey that I dont want to mess with it. I have installed Linux on this computer before without a hitch, but the addition of using the RAID, seems to have confused the poor penguin.....

either that or severe user error.

I'd gamble on user error but Ill blame the penguin


I suppose I could revert back to single disk, but I wanted to try this a few more times before giving up....

If it gets too annoying Ill kill the raid.........:frown:

 

[n0cmonkey]

Im not sure there are linux drivers for promise cards. Promise cards are software raid with a bios that helps out. The software was 100% proprietary last time I checked and they offer no information for Linux developers. This means that either Linux developers can reverse engineer the software (could bring legal troubles) or write their own software that is incompatible. Either way, its not going to be pretty. So look for drivers first and then consider whether this is what you really want. raid 0 is useless in my opinion though.

 

[Nosferatu]

Thank you for your quick responses. I will look for drivers on their site. Thanks for the info!

 

[Nosferatu]

looks like support is limited to a few distributions

redhat
suse
turbo
caldera
open

hmmmm......
is redhat as user frendly as mandrake?

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< looks like support is limited to a few distributions

redhat
suse
turbo
caldera
open

hmmmm......
is redhat as user frendly as mandrake? >>



It depends on the user.

 

[cleverhandle]

Promise support is only limited to those distributions as far as recognition at installation. The driver itself is in the kernel code, and is thus distro independent. I'm posting from a Slack 8 installation on a Promise RAID 0 array myself. But getting that set up is a bit tricky. Basically, you'll need to install your Linux distro to a second disk temporarily, then copy it over to the RAID partition and play some geometry games with LILO. If you want to do that, post back or PM, and I can walk you through it.

 

[Nosferatu]

Thank you very much for the offer. However I am an extreme newbie. Like less than an hour newbie...
I think the best bet would be to reinstall on a non raid partition.

I do have one more additional question though. I dont suppose either of you have any suggestions for a beginning linux book?

Linux for dummies perhaps?

Thanks

 

[cleverhandle]

"Running Linux" by O'Reilly is pretty much the Linux bible around these parts. Just ignore everything it has to say about the X-Window system, where the book is rather behind the times.

 

[Nosferatu]

Thank you for your suggestion. I will look further into it.

By the way I downloaded redmond Linux and it installed fine except for the very end.
it gets stuck at

/fsck0113.ren

Any idea what the heck that is?

 

[cleverhandle]

Fsck is the program used to check filesystem (disk) consistency. Not knowing Redmond Linux at all, I'm not sure exactly what part of the installation you're referring to, or what the "0113.ren" part means, though. As a total guess, it could be that the installation program is trying to check the consistency of one of your RAIDed disks - this would certainly be a problem if the system is seeing the disks individually and not as an array. If there are options during the install to recognize Windows partitions, you might want to decline them so that, initially, the only partitions the system knows about are the ones you're installing it on. Could also be that the fsck was just taking a long time - fscking a big disk takes a while, though you should see the disk access light blinking while it's working.

 

[Nosferatu]

Ok. Well I gave it like 45 minutes and I said forget it. mandrake didnt take nearly that long. ok.
Is it me or do you think they were having a bad day when creating those file names? LOL

Thanks for sticking around to answer my questions.

I am sure I will have more later.