[Techtalk] Prodigal daughter and dual boot woes

[Amanda Haynes]

Wow, thanks so much for everyone's responses and advice, it's already been
really helpful so far.  I'm excited to try out some of the virtualization
solutions everyone suggested and backup software as well.

> You haven't told us what's actually wrong with the RAID, and why you can't
> boot Ubuntu or dual boot, or even what kind of RAID controller it is.
> Cheers, Chris.

Right, I glossed over that because of the scary messages on the Ubuntu
community about how fake Raid isn't supported and "Trying to install Ubuntu
on such a partition could easily result in the loss of all your data" -- um
yeah I don't need that.  Plus the realization of what Conor pointed out ---
that a mistaken delete happily replicates to the second drive anyway and
that would apply to both HW and SW raid, so maybe I just wanted to go
another direction for protecting my data and my sanity.  But anyway, on
startup when I go into the Raid configuration utility, it says Intel Matrix
Storage Manager ROM v8.5.2.1002.  I haven't looked that up yet, and it
didn't come with a manual.

As for why I can't dual boot, the details are fuzzy now I tried so many
different things, but it went something like this... When I tried installing
Kubuntu the first time it just booted straight back up into Vista.  The
second time I tried something different with installing the boot loader
(can't remember what exactly, I just put in a different location for where
it should install).  That time I got a fatal GRUB error at the end of the
install and GRUB error 21 on reboot, and away went Vista as well.  Another
time I think I installed Grub in the right place (on the Kubuntu partition),
but it still booted straight into Vista.  That time I added an entry for
Kubuntu in the Vista bootloader using Easy BCD, but then when I selected it,
it took me to a GRUB command line.  I know that in theory from there I need
to load the kernel and then boot, but I don't know exactly how.... and some
other command I ran led me to believe that GRUB wasn't seeing the disk
correctly anyway.  I can't remember now, sorry :(  There were a few other
things I tried, but the bottom line is nothing seemed to work.  That's when
I started reading up on Raid and realizing that was probably highly
suspect.

During the install/partitioning process, the two drives show up
individually, and when I create partitions they just show up on one.  The
live CDs can see the data on the drives, I actually at one point was able to
burn a DVD of a few things I needed off my Vista partition after I had hosed
the OS in scenario #2 above :)

Conor/Chris, good thoughts and cautions on dealing with the Raid...  I'm not
afraid of reinstalling Vista so that's not a big deal.  And the Intel Matrix
Storage Manager gives me an option to Reset the disks to non-raid, so I
shouldn't be afraid of corrupting anything there, should I?  Or should I try
the alternate CD and fakeraid... sounds kinda risky, especially for someone
as clueless as I am!

Thanks,
Amanda