cheap raid card recognized by both linux and Windoze xp

[Nicholas Leippe]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Kelly Terry <ksterry at xmission.com> wrote:
> I have a multiboot system that I use both linux and windows xp on.  It
> had an 80 gb drive which was inadequate for recording tv on.  I got
> 2-640 gb drives that I want to stripe in a raid 0 and do a clean
> reinstall of both os's.  The only problem is in using the linux
> installer for partition setup and formatting.  The mobo supports raid
> and windows recognizes it as such.  To get the linux partitions set up
> the installer (Mandriva, OpenSuse, Kubuntu) doesn't recognize it as a
> raid set up.  It sees each drive separately and allows me to partition
> and format each one individually but not as a raid.  Does anyone know
> of a cheap raid card that will allow both drives to seen by linux
> installers as a raid and not individually?

dm (linux device mapper) can understand several different software
raid formats (including 'fakeraid' that some motherboard bioses
'implement').
If your bios/'hardware' is supported, you may just need to tell the
installation boot loader to load the right module and it's parameters.

try some of these:
http://people.redhat.com/heinzm/sw/dmraid/readme
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/RAID/NVRAID_with_dmraid
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto

OTOH, Windows XP can actually do software raid itself. So if you want
to just leave the bios/fakeraid out of the picture, you can configure
software raid for both windows and linux as you see fit.

Not all linux distro installers allow for a simple root-on-raid1
install, but as long as it allows you to get to a shell, you can
usually make them work.

I don't know if you can put C: on software raid1 in windows, but I
know you can easily create mirrors (and stripes) in windows. You can
even do it in Windows XP Home if you copy the appropriate dll from an
XP Pro install--the feature is in XP Home, just disabled/hidden.

Nick