Hello everyone,
I currently have a 1TB RAID0 array setup with Windows 7 installed on a 500GB partition. My southbridge is a VIA VT8237A. When I boot into the openSUSE 11.4 installer, it sees the two drives as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. This alarmed me. Its proposed partition layout was to setup the root home and swap partitions on sad, and mount two windows partitions, sda1 and sdb1.
So clearly, something is not right. I saw an old PDF regarding suse 10 that mentioned including via_sata and via_pata in broken_modules before installing, and using some other driver. Does anyone have any input? I would really like to make sure I don’t damage the windows partition.
Thanks!
My guess you have FAKE RAID (AKA BIOS assisted). This may or may not be usable since it usually requires a propritary drive which may or may not be available. You should use a real RAID card or software RAID (but Windows does not do software RAID).
Anytime you play with partitions you should backup all important data.
Thanks gogalthorp. That’s really unfortunate. I guess, what makes it a “fake RAID” as opposed to a “real RAID”? It’s obviously hardware-based, but I guess there is something different, because the installer can still see both drives.
That procedure I mentioned was found here. It looks like they are disabling sata_via, pata_via, and ahci, and loading their custom drivers. So I suppose this may work too, if I can find all of the (and latest) files.