Dazed & Confused in Phoenix...

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Ok, I’m a newbie to Linux. Now that’s out of the way, I previously had Vista setup on my computer, but one of the drives failed so I lost my array of 2-500Gb 7200rpm SATA II Seagates. For some reason, I couldn’t reinstall Vista, so I decided to first load Linux and go from there.

Had a he!! of a time trying to install Linux - installed Ubuntu several times, but it wouldn’t save any boot information (even using GAG Boot Loader), kept trying to use the MBR, a seperate boot partition, switched out drives, even the GAG Boot Loader! Finally, got openSUSE to boot after quite a bit of troubleshooting.

Now, I still can’t reinstall Vista!! I know one of the 500Gb drives is bad, so now I’m using an array of 2-250Gb SATA II drives mirrored. When I try to install Vista, obviously I can’t use one of the Linux partitions (says there’s no space available, even though there’s a 127Gb partition completely unused setup as /home). But I try to setup the 250Gb RAID as one or two partitions, and it says that this drive is outside of the parameters that Vista needs to be installed onto. What gives???

K8v SE Deluxe Motherboard
openSUSE 11.2
256Mb GForce2 NVidia Card
2-250Gb 7200rpm Seagates SATA II-Raid 1
1-160Gb 10,000rpm Seagate SATA II-Raid 0

Basically, would really like to setup the OS’s (openSUSE & Vista) on the 160Gb drive and everything else on the Raid array. Right now, I have the following partitions:

250Gb Array -
160Gb Array - 2Gb (Swap) / 70.54Mb (Boot) / 20Gb “/” / 127Gb “/home”

Ideally, I would use the following setup:

160Gb Array - 2Gb (Swap) / 70.54Mb (Boot) / 20Gb “/” / 140Gb (Vista OS & Programs)
250Gb Array - 125Gb “/home” / 125Gb (Vista storage drive)

2

How can you have only one RAID 0 drive does not make sense. RAID 0 is stripped ie every other sector is written to each drive. If you lose one drive you lose all data. RAID 0 still requires 2 drives. RAID 0 is not the same as mirroring ie RAID 1

Note Mirroring is not the same as backing up.

3

Again, I’m a newbie, not sure, but I know it’s setup as a Raid 0 array and has only one drive. Couldn’t afford 2 drives for it, and only the one controller on the motherboard allows me to setup Raid 0 with only one drive. Had this setup previously and got it all working, so I don’t believe it’s having only 1 drive in the array causing a problem…

4

In a terminal in linux

su -

fdisk -l

and post the output.

5

Disk /dev/dm-5 doesn’t contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-6: 107.4 GB, 107372805120 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 13054 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2052474d

This doesn’t look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/dm-6p1 ? 410 119791 958924038+ 70 DiskSecure Multi-Boot
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/dm-6p2 ? 121585 234786 909287957+ 43 Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/dm-6p3 ? 14052 14052 5 72 Unknown
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/dm-6p4 164483 164486 25945 0 Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/dm-7: 136.3 GB, 136333983744 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 16574 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-7 doesn’t contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-8: 142.7 GB, 142683899904 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 17346 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xffffffff

Disk /dev/dm-8 doesn’t contain a valid partition table

6

Ok, looks like I need to completely redo openSUSE and all partitions…but I setup each of the partitions from within the openSUSE 11.2 installation? Not sure what I did wrong…setup each of the Linux partitions as EXT4 (with the obvious exception of the swap file)…

7

Before redoing this I would check the bios settings,look for settings to do with your disk controlers.you want these set corectly before partitioning.

For me I would be inclined to download parted magic and use that to setup partitions first.

The easiest way to setup a dual boot here will be windows first then openSUSE will add it to its boot loader

8

also as gogalthorp has pointed out,you can’t have RAID 0 on one disk only,if you have something telling you that you do,you need to fix this problem.

9

Ok, downloading Parted Magic now - Thanks for the tip!!! As for BIOS, I’m in there pretty frequently making sure the settings are what I want. I have to change the settings each time I want to boot to a different device, so while I’m already in there, I look at everything else as well. I’m positive the BIOS is set correctly, but I will definitely setup the partitions (hopefully correctly this time!) first, then try to install Vista yet again before finishing with openSUSE 11.2. Thanks again for the help thus far!!

10

Just a reminder,remember to make one of your four allowed primary partitions an extended primary to allow for logical partitions on your OS disk.

11

I have a quick question - I’m in Parted Magic, and it’s not recognizing my Raid Array (the 250Gb drives)…how do I partition around it?

12

I have no experience with raid so answers there will have to come from someone else.As I understand you intend to install on your single drive, does this show up in gparted?

13

Here is the problem some motherboards use what is called fake RAID. This sometime just does not work.

I’d question why you want RAID at all. But since you seem determined. I’d say use Software RAID or buy a real hardware RAID card.

The fact that you can’t install VISTA means your partitioning is all out of wack. Start from scratch and erase all partitions. I’d turn off the BIOS fake RAID to be sure I could really get everything gone. Personally I’d never turn it on again but that is up to you.

14

Yeah, I noticed that the Raid Array listed as “Functional” wasn’t actually even working! LOL! Good ol’ technology…Needless to say, I took gogalthorp’s advice and turned off the Raid support in BIOS and changed the SATA II devices to IDE devices instead. Hopefully, this will work with Vista…didn’t seem to recognize any drives before but will try this all over again! Thanks for everyone’s help so far!

15

Yep rely on a 50 cent RAID controller to protect your data. :open_mouth:

16

Well, fortunately, I don’t rely on it to protect my data at all! I’ve always been very conscious of backing up my data, on CD, DVD, or USB drives / memory cards. Learned my lesson long ago.

Solved the problems - apparently, Windows Vista doesn’t like to share a drive with anything but Windows…didn’t like even the swap partition for Linux. Once I removed all of that, Vista started installing right away. Also, it absolutely has to be installed onto a device that is enabled to boot from BIOS / one of the devices listed to boot to. Anyways, got rid of the RAID…think I’ll stick with non-RAID applications from now on!!!

Thanks again for everyone’s help!!!

-Jason
rotfl!

17

Thanks for the feed back,although setting up partitions first,
worked for me I have not done it this way with vista,I made an assumption I should not have made.

I won’t be giving that piece of advice in the future.

With vista installed,further partitioning for openSUSE should not cause for concern over the partition that vista likes.Including a resize.