I just installed SUSE 11.2 as dual-boot with WinXP on an older system that has a 160GB PATA drive and a 500GB SATA RAID drive. I left about 80GB on the PATA drive unpartitioned to accommodate SUSE. During the initial installation attempt, SUSE was determined to install on the RAID drive instead of the PATA drive, so I disabled the SATA drivers in the BIOS to force the installation on the PATA drive. This was successful, but now there is no access to the RAID drive from SUSE because there is no driver and it is not mounted. I reactivated the SATA drivers in the BIOS and the RAID drive reappeared in WinXP with everything intact. The SATA drives now appear in SUSE under Hardware Information as “/dev/sdb” and “/dev/sdc” and the listed driver is “sata_sil”.
So how do I get the RAID drivers installed in SUSE and then mount the drive so it can be browsed/modified from Dolphin? I would also like to be able to browse/change this drive from other computers on my home network through samba, just like with WinXP.
Sorry if that was confusing. The system contains three hard disk drives - one 160GB PATA drive and two 250GB SATA drives. The SATA drives are configured as one RAID 0, 500GB drive. The configuration is done in the BIOS, which allows for either two separate SATA drives or one RAID drive.
I disabled all SATA drives in the BIOS in order to force SUSE to install on the empty portion of the PATA drive. This was successful. Then I turned on the SATA+RAID drivers in the BIOS again, which restored the RAID drive in WinXP. I now would like to have that RAID drive be available in SUSE.
I am booting into both SUSE Linux and WinXp just fine.
Yes, I want to keep the NTFS format on the RAID drive. It has music & videos I want to keep.
I tried the command su-c fdisk-l as superuser from a terminal. What I got back was "f ‘su-c’ is not a typo you can use command-not-found to lookup the package that contains it, like this:
cnf su-c
Yes it looks like Linux only saw the first of the two drives as NTFS. I don’t know if you can get Linux to work with this setup.
However I will comment on the RAID-0. It’s just concatenating the two drives to form a larger “drive”. This gives you no redundancy and actually increases the risk of failure since losing either drive loses the system. Maybe you could break it up into two drives C: and D: in Windows, each of which can be mounted in Linux. But I don’t know how to do this in Windows without a reinstall. The disadvantage is of course that you don’t pool the free space on C: and D:.
Actually, I’ve had RAID 0 drives on all my systems since the Pentium 233 and never had a failure. I like them because I can concatenate two slow drives into a fairly fast drive and they use space more efficiently. I think I’ve had these two particular drives running for about five years.
But in any case, it’s not important as there is nothing vital on this system. I plan to use it as a server on my home network and for the kids/grandkids to send/receive pictures and videos over the internet. If it goes down, no big deal. I normally back everything up on another system with a 2TB RAID 0 drive and another 2TB of individual drives(big power supply).
I think the problem will be that it won’t mount half of a filesystem. He’s using sdb and sdc in RAID-0 (striping), not RAID-1 (mirroring). It’s almost certainly fakeraid in the BIOS. The only chance of success is if Linux handles this particular RAID controller.
If it does not mount it does not nothing lost in trying. The one hope is that the partitions on sbc are unknown. So it might work. I certainly would not try writing anything to that partition.
