Vista dual-boot over Intel ICH9M-E SATA RAID

Hi. Been trying to set up a dual boot with Vista (factory-installed) and OpenSUSE 11.1. Using OpenSUSE LiveCD to install. I cannot get past the partitioning stage of the OpenSUSE installer. From the installer I see no way of specifying one of the DM volumes as the install target. NB, I’m not a regular Linux user at the moment, but I’m comfortable configuring grub by hand, would welcome intricate solutions if necessary.

Specs
Sony Vaio TT190 w/ 2 64Gb ssd
Intel ICH9M-E SATA RAID

I suspect this is a Matrix Raid setup. Vista storage mgr shows main disk of 119.25Gb, of which 6.35 is set aside as a volume marked “EISA Configuration”. OpenSUSE partitioner identifies this as “Recovery”.

What I Tried

  • From Vista Disk Management, I shrank the main Vista volume, created a third volume, labeled it “Use This Volume”
  • From OpenSUSE installer, chose “Custom partitioning”

But, once in Custom Partitioning, I saw no way to choose the new volume as the install target. I could create a Logical Volume with Swap and / partitions, but of course that won’t be bootable.

I understand about fixing grub/devices.map and will be glad to do that once the installation get to that point. But I can’t seem to choose one of the dev/mapper volumes as the thing to be partitioned, as per this thread–

*(http://forums.opensuse.org/hardware/402147-im-puzzled-intel-bios-raid.html#post1910779)

The only option in the master list of volumes, where the DM volumes appear at the same level as sda and sdb, is “Import Mount Points”.

Am I missing something super trivial? Should I break up my target volume before I get to the installer (e.g. in Vista’s storage manager or with some other partitioner? Guidance on this would be welcome.)

Thanks in advance.*