Installing Fedora 4 on SATA raid 0...
I always used to have an old IDE disk as boot disk [C:] with a MSDOS bootsector , Linux grub bootsector etc - all handled by the Windows NT bootmanager. I removed it because I thought it was too noisy. I also moved my SCSI U160 raid to another machine, replaced it by a intel SATA raid 0 with 2 160GB SATA disks - leaving my machine with a single big 320GB SATA raid 0 disk. I lost some disk performance of course but gained space and hopefully lost some noise. As usual I made a small boot partition (C: with 500MB classic FAT16) at the beginning of the raid, SYS-ted with MSDOS then installed Windows 2003 on a second NTFS partition. So far I had no problem at all.
Basic disk layout:
----boot-------Windows-------Linux------------------Docs&data--
FAT 500MB | NTFS 30GB | Ext3 20GB | SwapFS | NTFS 270GB
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
When trying to install Fedora 4 all went well until diskpartition. I didn't dare the automatic partition and "DiskDruid" only recognized my disk as 2 empty SATA drives "sda" and "sdb" and asked if I wanted to erase all data on them. Pressing "NO" exits installation (didn't try "YES"!). Looking for a solution, RedHat simply says that BIOS-configured SATA-raids is not supported and suggests a UNIX soft raid instead. Some people says that loading "dmraid" during installtion (via shell command) will partly do the trick. GRUB bootloader seems not work with SATA-raids at all.
So, a solution for me would be to load dmraid at installation, install GRUB on my Ext3 partition (/, /boot etc) and copy the GRUB bootsector to my boot FAT partition to be handled by the NT bootmanager.
I will try the following commands before diskpartition:
rpm -i dmraid-1.0.0.rc8-FC4_5.i386.rpm
dmraid -ay -v
Any comments on this?
regards Jerker, Sweden
