[Westwales] Windows 1: Linux 0

[Robert Savage]

During an idle moment I assessed the noise coming from my main "Admin" 
machine and decided that as it resembled a distant vacuum cleaner, that 
together with its rather slow performance it was time to liven it up and 
quieten it down.

Having never tried SATA drives I ordered a couple of 250GB ones (they 
hadn't got anything smaller in stock) and decided I would create a RAID 
array and have that as the only HD system in the machine.  The ABIT M/B 
was suitably equipped for such a setup so I first installed Windows 
2000, pressing F6 and offering it the HighPoint driver floppy disk when 
requested to do so.  Windeeze charged away and installed itself quite 
happily, initially using the whole 500GB array for itself.  On reboot 
the system seemed impressively quicker and certainly a lot quieter so 
the next task was to install Linux Mandriva 2007 Spring Free from a 
Linux Format DVD.  I used the excellent partitioner to shrink the 
Windows partition down to  20GB, gave it a couple of 20 GB partitions to 
play with and created a 10GB Linux partition for Madriva.  All went in 
OK and boot up selection was set for MBR.  On reboot I got the message 
"Grub loading.......  Error 18" and it stopped dead.  I reinstalled the 
whole thing and it still failed to boot.  I tried the Mandriva 'Rescue' 
function on the disk,  waste of time couldn't get into anything useful 
to check anything, there didn't seem to be a /boot  directory.

Ah So!,  as they say somewhere in the world, try another 
distribution.......I did that,  Ubuntu 7.04 (on the same DVD), this 
didn't recognize the RAID array and treated both drives as separate 
drives no point trying that one then........Gentoo 2007.0....again 
failed to boot and the latest test was with Fedora 7 which again 
couldn't  boot up.  Gave up and bought some ear plugs.  :-)

My conclusions from all this is that SATA drives are only any use as a 
secondary RAID array when the main O/S is installed on a normal IDE 
drive.   Am I right in this thinking or do later motherboards handle 
SATA differently?  What is Error 18 anyway?

Cheers All

Bob