Adding linux on a seperate drive to XP on raid

rudeboymcc · 25 Apr 2006 at 18:28

Hi. I have an Asus K8VSE deluxe which has dual sata raid, Promise and Via.

At the moment I've got XP installed on a mirror raid on the Promise controller and a spare hard disk on the VIA set as IDE. I did this becuase when I setup the Via as raid, Windows did not recognise the other hard disk on the Promise controller.

All i want to do is install Linux on the seperate hard disk. I downloaded Suse 10 and a message came up saying that hte raid setup was actualy software raid (I've read linux doens't support hardware raid), adn so the two raid disks came up seperately.

My question is, when Linux installs the Boot loader nad changes the MBR which is on the raid disks, will it ruin the raid setup? The disks are in NTFS and i can only choose one disk to put the boot loader on. Will it automatically copy the new MBR to the second disk when I write it to just one disk?

I can't run the boot loader from the other disk becuase I can only boot from the hard disks connected to the Promise controller (option to change the first hard disk dissappears when you setup raid on the promise).

Thanks for any help.

Greeny132 · 25 Apr 2006 at 19:53

MAybe not quite what you are looking for but if youe BIOS has a boot menu option (i.e on mine it says "press esc for boot menu") you can install the bootloader into the MBR of your linux disk then when you want linux just hit the hot key whatever it may be and pick your linux drive from the menu. Hope this helps, Damo.

rudeboymcc · 25 Apr 2006 at 20:04

Here's how my Bios works. in the Boot order, it only shows one hard disk. You have to choose which hard disk comes first. When I didn't have an array, it was an option "select first hard disk". Now though when I have an array, the option has disappeared and so I can't change which hard disk it boots to.

One thing I just thought of, if I take one of the raid disks out, and set the otehr one as just simple IDE, will that delete anythhing? I could then instal linux as normal and it won't have any problems with the MBR as it would be a standard SATA disk. Then when I'm done I could set up the Raid againa nd tell it to copy over the information from the newly edited hard disk.

Will taht work? Or will i risk losing data? I'm new to raid and have heard horror stories of people loosing their data.

Greeny132 · 25 Apr 2006 at 23:47

I have never used raid in my life, what I meant was when your system first boots my bios gives me the usual Press del to enter bios and ALSO press Esc to enter boot menu. I wouldn't like to advise you on the raid thing cos I'm clueless was just suggesting a possible workaround.