wacky hard drive setup

[MooseMuffin]

OK, heres what I'm trying to do:

I run windows XP pro on a 2 drive raid 0 array off of a promise fasttrack 100 tx2. I recently got an old harddrive from a friend, and old small 10gb thing. The idea is to load linux on it so I can learn it in my free time while still having all my XP stuff. This doesnt sound too unreasonable to me. Unfortunately, I cant even get close. I have this new drive set as primary master, my 2 cd drives as secondary master and slave, and my first boot drive as the raid array. With the new drive plugged in though, XP refuses to boot and linux refuses to install. Formatting the new drive in any type of file system doesnt seem to do the trick. Both seem to work fine as long as the new drive and the old array arent plugged in at the same time. Any advice? My best guess at the moment is that theres some conflict over drive letter...

 

[Ytru4u]

make sure that the jumpers on the 2nd harddrive, the one you got form your friend are set the slave, ohh and you might have to set the jumper on your primary master to master with slave.

 

[MooseMuffin]

Hmm, but its trickier than that. My primary master is on a raid card, so its not on my ide channels at all i dont think. And setting the 2nd drive to master or slave doesnt help.

 

[huesmann]

Why don't you use a boot disk and completely wipe the 10GB drive?

 

[oldman420]

what you need to do is set the bios to boot from the ide drive 10gig one and install linix with a bootloader that will give you the option to boot fron the raid.if you want i recomend mandrake for this as it has a great bootloader and works well for beginners "which i still am"

 

[MooseMuffin]

Ahh, much progress has been made. Windows will now recgonize and boot with the drive plugged in (uninstalled nvidias software ide driver thats an optional part of their motherboard driver installation). So, now I can format at will with partition magic. This is what I have now:

-A small boot partition at the end of my main drive that will (in theory) let me pick what OS to boot. This uses boot magic, part of partition magic
-the 10gig drive formatted for linux
-bootable mandrake 10 cds
-more problems

I can get up to the step where I choose which packages to install, but nothing installs. About 10 minutes after pushing next and looking at a grey screen, the instalation progress bars come up, but nothing really happens, (i went to bed for 9 hours, woke up and there was no change, no progress). I figured that maybe my drive was actually busted, which would explain alot. I went back into windows, reformatted it to fat32 and transfered some files to it. It wasnt a very fast transfer, and bogged my computer a bit (the drive is on an old ata cable that limits speed to ata33, I'll replace it once I decide that this project isnt hopeless) but everything made it and everything worked, so I guess the drive works.

What else could be broken?