xboxboy

Hi all, I've finally got my new system up and running. I've installed Mandy 2008 DVD, as thats what I have used in the past (Also have 2008.1 cd's, that install actually broke on me, and I'm not sure if the cd's are the same as the DVD?). Install went well. No dramas at all. Upon reboot, I get dumped at a terminal and I use XFdrake, but dont have any luck. I'm using an acer x213w if that changes anything. Video card is a Nvidia EN9400GT, with 512mb so should be quite nice for my bit of doodling around. As always any help most appreciated. Thanks.

Well its up and running, and didn't it take some doing/ From looking all over the web lots and lots of people are having trouble. But luckily I found a solution on the Asus forums. Turn raid off in BIOS. Hook a hard drive to the E_SATA1 port, and do a windows install.....Now this is not supported, but it works. So I had a working SP3 on E_SATA1. Shutdown pc, turn raid on in BIOS and reboot. Windows loaded and found new hardware, wants to install driver, so install the raid driver. Shutdown pc. Added the two raid drives, rebooted, enter the intel matrix Rom, set the array up and reboot. Enter Bios to ensure booting of E_SATA1 hard disk still. Reboot. Windows is up and running with a raid1 data array. I shutdown and moved the boot drive from E_SATA1, back onto the intel ich10r controller, entered bios, set the boot disk. Reboot pc. All is working. The driver I gave to windows when it wanted the raid driver was the same floppy I had been f6 adding to install, but it would just not work...... So know I got windows and mandy on a boot drive, with plenty of room for messing with other distros. And two hard drives in raid1, being purely data drives. I'm going to move my docs off the windows partition and onto the data raid array, and the same with the /home folder. Exactly what I wanted. Yay....It only took nearly 1 month, obviously intel, marvell, ASUS or MS have a driver glitch somewhere, hopefully I wont need to go through this again, or updated drivers will behave better. Now I just gotta get X windows up on mandy, I get dropped to a text login, and XFdrake doesn't sort it out.......

Hi, welcome to Mandriva users. This forum is full of amazingly helpful and knowledgeful people. A good guide to help you get a desktop up and running is : http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desk...ne-2009.0-gnome I personally dont run the gnome desktop, never have used gnome, I'm told its good. I use kde, been using that since mandrake 9 (mandriva from many years ago) OR: http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desk...2008-spring-kde Which details the 2008.1 kde desktop set up. I couldn't find a 2009 kde walkthrough sorry, but I've heard a few complaints about 2009 kde as it uses a all new kde interface. You can down grade, but I would imagine it would be complicated. Have a go with gnome. I think thats what ubuntu is using, and thats "supposively" the most user friendly desktop anyway. Linux seems complicated, and time consuming, but it is such a pleasure to use when set up properly. I am constantly surprised with linux, its always doing new stuff nowadays. Pictures, data management, hardware support its all fantastic. Personally Im having issues with a new pc, but its windows thats causing me dramas. Ill push through it and I'm sure I use mandriva for most of the time. Some times new hardware is lacking support in linux, but windows has dramas too....Neither is better, but understand linux, and you will see that you control the computer...not the computer controll the way you work.

Still having dramas here. Here is the a link to the mother board manual if some one would like to help. http://support.asus.com/download/download....model=P5Q%20PRO I've searched plenty of forums out there, and this seems to cause lots of issues for people. I now have 3 hard drives. One 500gb that I would like to boot from, xp and mandy, plus trial distros. 2 640 gb drives that I want to set in RAID1 through the ICH10R controller....The silicon image controller needs windows to run, so is no good for linux as well.... I almost think I've got a setting in BIOS somewhere that I'm just not setting right.. It's definately a driver issue, so whether I need to turn off the silicon image controller and all accessories on the board and start from scratch, or I just genuinely have a hardware glitch I don't really know. Any help most apreciated.

Ran XFdrake from command line, have now got x up and running. Used the nv driver. Am attempting to add nvidia driver...

Tried to install mandy 2008.1, with the raid drives disconnected. Cannot load X now...I never got mandy to boot before. It boots, but no x windows. My motherboard doesn't have on board video, so I'm guessing I have a video glitch. It is a nvidia Asus EN9400GT silent. Should have been fine for what I want to do. What am I missing here???

Quick update guys. I've had enough of the messing around trying to boot off the raid array, so I purchased another hard disk, sata, to run off the marvell controller as a boot disk and have the raid array as purely data.... Great idea in theory, not so great in practice...still getting windows BSOD upon reboot.... Why is this so hard????? Im sure when its figured it will be great, but I'm going mental here. lol..

Thanks guys, how do I edit this grub then?? Sorry I tried to reinstall the bootloader from the mandriva disc, but no good.

Ian, thanks for reply. sda1 is windows sda5 data sda6 swap sda7 linux root

Ok so I tried to install 2008. Everything went ok I think. I left the windows install at 50gb 2nd partition at 500gb, this is to be my data partition, not sure what to format it as, so I did NTFS,,,,Had the option of NTFS-3G should I have used this???? 3rd partition was 7mb swap, was as low as I could go, next size up was like 15gb or something rediculous. 4th partition was 10gm for mandy 2008 and the remaining 50gb free for other distros and messing around When I rebooted, no menu!!! Straight back into windows....:( So I try to reinstall the boot loader, what it sees is: (detects the raid setup fine) /dev/loop0 /dev/sda /dev/sda1 /dev/sda5 /dev/sda6 /dev/sda7 /dev/sdb /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb5 /dev/sdb6 /dev/sdb7 It finds a mandriva linux, root on /dev/sda7 when i run reinstall, this is what i get: running: sh/boot/grub/install.sh with root /mnt grub>root (hd0,86) error 21 Selected disk does not exist grub> setup --stage2=.boot/grub/stage2 (hd0) error 12 Invalid device requested grub> quit Too me it seems as though it isn't installing to the MBR correctly...Ok how does one go about fixing this???

So now my windows i performing perfectly...well as good as it can LOL.... I've been thinking, has anyone managed to get the My Docs from windows and /home from linux on the same partition? I can see how to move my docs to a partition and /home to a partition, but how to combine them??? could you have /home with /my docs as a directory with in that? I'm not sure Suggestions please, Thank you for your help with the RAID setup, I'm most pleased with the result.!!!

mmm now I feel silly. I changed to an untampered xp disc. Fired up straight away, installing all drivers now. Raid1 is working! Wooo Hoo!

I had a friend pop over, who was able to boot windows with out the auto reboot, so I could read the BSOD. STOP 0x0000007B A very broad fault code.. We believe it is the raid driver given that it boots fine with raid turned off. So far I have tried the latest driver from intel, no good The latest driver from ASUS no good. I've just done a bios update, and reinstalling with latest ASUS driver. So Im just letting it install and we will see how we go this time..... Funnily enough, my Mandy 2008 disk (Thanks Aussie john) sees the Raid array, with no messing around what so ever......

Yes its the loading sign. If I diable raid through the bios, then it boots fine.

From what I understand yes. The mother board manual is written in broken english unfortunately. The windows install goes fine, just upon initial reboot it doesn't load past the windows symbol and enters a continual reboot loop.

Ian, there are 8 sata ports in all. 2 are on the silicon image controller, which you can use software (os controlled raid). 6 ports are controlled through the intel matrix, ICH10R controller, which is raid on the motherboard, but the ICH10R needs a driver install to use as raid. I guess this means the ICH10R is the fakeraid we hear so much about. I spun up my mandriva install disk and the install program sees the raid array correctly, so my raid installation is fine. Yay. I have a copy of pclinux07 which is a live disk and that runs fine. The bad news...looks like windows is broken....when trying to use raid1 I guess I'm gonna have to trawl the web.....

Woah. Setting up this raid appears easy, but is not, or my execution of it sucks. :( I think I have my drives hooked up correctly...I have 8 sata connectors. 2 Connectors are SATA silicon image, these are for hard drives only, ATAPI device is not supported. Has what I understand to be purely software raid capability. 6 connectors are Sata ICH10R (intel matrix), these are for the onboard raid controller, which requires drivers to be installed. The two silicon image connectors are called SATA_E1 and _E2. The 6 ICH10R connectors are SATA1 through SATA6. I have connected a hard disk to each SATA1 and SATA2. I set the storage config to Raid in the bios as asked in the manual. I was able to create a raid volume in the Intel matrix set up option during the bios post. I assume that the DVD drive (is a SATA unit) is a ATAPI device and have connected that to SATA3. When installing windows (I wanted to get xp installed before I think of getting Linux running) during install I used the F6 method to install the driver for the ICH10R device. Windows appeared to install correctly (XP service pack 3), upon reboot, as windows does during an install, it got to the Windows XP splash screen and then goes back to reboot. I've tried various things but can not get past this. I popped back into BIOS turned off RAID storage, and away she boots to XP, but with out raid. Can anyone see any issues?? If not what further information will be of help? I was a little worried last night as I had extremely high CPU temps in the bios section (like 80 degrees c!) but today I fiddled with the cooler, and the temps now stay at about 35. I don't think that bit of light running at high temps should have hurt it. Whilst not ideal, I have seen around the place people over clocking these poor E2200 to rediculous speeds and temperatures. I just need to get windows to boot correctly.

So basically suck it and see??? I did some googling and couldn't find any drivers as such. Thanks Ian

Ok guys, I have purchased my new baby, ASUS p5q pro. Reading through all the manuals for all my stuff. I wanna do this build once, and make it right. My last couple of years I've been messing around with my build, but I want to set and forget this one.....If I can resist that is. The motherboard manual shows how to create a raid array with out any os installed. But you have to make a raid driver disk. The raid controller is a ICH10R, and install the raid controller driver during the windows install. I've checked out the ASUS website, no documentation, but ~9mb of linux drivers. I am assuming this driver wont be installed by default using the Mandy install (Probably 2008 or 2008.1 thats what I have), and I will have to install a similar linux driver as well? If this is the case, am I right in thinking the OS's see the RAID controller as a device only. Where one of the hard drives can be removed and fitted to another system and read with no changes?

Hi John, Have you been running the 64 bit version up til now?

Thanks John. I reckon this board should suit my needs.

Thanks for all your input guys, very helpful. This seems to be a bit of a tricky topic. I'm considering the ASUS p5q pro. I'm fairly certain it will do what I want. ie produce a raid1 array with out the OS's needing drivers. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboard...-p5q-pro_2.html Am I correct?? Does this mean if I have a hardware problem I can simply plug one of the drives into another pc and read it?? Thanks once again

I am considering purchasing an aspire one. They appear to be fantastic. The linux version has a 8gb solid state drive. Very nice, but perhaps a bit small for what I could be doing. The windows version has 120Gb generic hard disk. The price difference is nelegible. What do you think the chances are I could easily install the original linux distro on a windows version? I don't think there should be any issue, as far as I can see only the hard drives vary between the two. The orignal install is Linpus, most reports are that it is a great made to fit install. [moved from Hardware by spinynorman]

Now I'm a bit confused :( What I want is a raid1 set up that is run independant of the operating systems, as I'll be using both windows and linux. I think the point being made is that most motherboard raid setups are infact run through the os, where the raid on the motherboard needs a driver used in the os....??? I think this is what is being explained. So if this is the case then these motherboard raid setups will be no good for a dual boot system???

Looking around it seems almost any motherboard worth having has hardware raid built in. So I intend to do the following. Raid 1...ie. mirror two disks together for data protection obviously have a boot sector/partition A XP partition A data patition, this will be mounted as /home in linux, linked to in my docs in XP, probably NTFS....second thoughts ext3 A swap partition A linux install partition Whats the rule with swap patition these days. thinking back it used to be twice the physical ram, is this still the case. Any one have an opinion on those hard drive partitions?