Ok here I go diving in and getting my feet wet. I'll probibly land on my head. I am trying Linux for the first time. No need just curious and trying to learn. I have both Ununtu 8.10 and Mint 6 images on seperate dvds. Both boot just fine from the dvd. I can browse the web they both seem to recognize most everything ie: printer, wheel mouse, video card, sound card, keyboard. Just not my raid 0 set up. I have an icon for what I an sure is my C drive but that's it. Most everything is saved on my D drive though. I know there is a way to add it but I am stumped. Guess I haven't spent enough time playing around yet. Oh I am running each from the live dvd I created. Maybe I can not see all drives until I install? Almost forgot to mention I am using two WD 160Gb drives formatted in FAT32 with XP Media Center installed now. Practice makes perfect but only if you practice perfectly!

Be very careful to start. I suggest that you consider a virtual machine to test out OS's. The live cd/dvd's are great also but don't get you the feel of the installer and such. Most people bork their xp install the first time. Be sure you know how to back up your xp install to remote storage. Raids to linux may be different than xp see's them. Xp has what may be termed soft raid and linux doesn't support them fully. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

I'm not ready to install yet. Still just playing around. If I can't get to me D drive it is not that bad. Xp has already been backed up no problem there. Just not sure I want to install until I have worked with it a while. I tried using Wubi at first to I assume make a vertual partition and dual boot using Ubuntu. I kept getting BusyBox. Got the same with Kubuntu. Finally gave up and made the dvd. I don't have any trouble installing or partitioning I know how to do all that. Practice makes perfect but only if you practice perfectly!