I have just bought a P4 computer and having the ATA RAID feature setup for Windows XP home and plug the IDe cable to IDE3 instaed of IDE1. The RAID features started (scan) every time when the computer start. I have then using Partition Magic 7 to creat a swap partition and a EXT2 partition for linux. However, during the installation of SuSE Linux8.0, the setup told me that there was no hardisk found on the computer. I wonder if it is the RAID feature that cause a problem. Can someone help me out? Thank you

Hi, Right away, Yes, this is most probably caused by u're ATA RAID array. Most RAID arrays I know of in motherboards these days are software RAID arrays, ie) the processor does most of the work. The firmware on the RAID cards just helps to create a sort of interface that OSs can fool themselves with into thinking that it really is one drive. So the bottomline is this. U need some special sort of drivers if u want to access the RAID array as such. And more importantly that is not at all recommended for the simple reason that both Windoze as well as Linux have very efficient Software RAID capability, that do not require some souped up firmware on the IDE controllers. So what u should do is.. When the machine is booting up, u probably get a bios prompt that says something like "press Alt-F3 to enter RAID Setup". So enter that setup and disable the "RAID" capability. After that u should be able to use both drives individually. I know for a fact that in Linux u can setup partitions as RAID volumes, but am not so sure if NT will allow it to coexist on the same system. Anyways, now that u know the why's and wherefores of this, u should probably read up on this link: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html and make a good decision as to what u want to do. Good Luck Kannan