I have 5 drives on an Intel ICH10R controller, 4 of which are 320GB each, those are the Raid 0 drives, now, this is not a question, but a suggested workaround (worked for me anyway). I have been fighting with different distros (not the people, installing, lol) since 2006, trying to get them to run on 'hardware Raid'. What I have discovered is (and don't take this the wrong way, Linux code writers) partition managers and formatters in installation distro disks can't handle a newly created (raw) Raid volumes (aka, fakeraid, bios drive, whatever you want to call it), so what I did was created a new Raid 'drive' with the Intel bios utility (I named it lin_raid, distros don't like numbers in the volume name, probably because the Linux device mapper adds a number to the name for its own identifying purposes), then I used a Seagate DiscWizard HDD setup utility (which you can get here http://lug.mtu.edu/ubcd/ubcd511.iso on Ultimate Boot CD 5.11) to 'prepare' (creates a typical MBR, crucial for the Grub overwrite, and a single bootable formatted partition) the Raid 0 volume for Windows XP SP1 or greater (lol, as if), anyway, it would appear that Kubuntu (and other distros) love to 'overwrite' existing MBRs and partitions but fail miserably when faced with a new 'raw' drive (not 'laid out' first by a third party utility). So I pop in the Kubuntu 12.04 disk AFTER setting up the drive with the Seagate utility, go straight to the installer and chose 'Guided, use entire disk', dropped the list down and chose the Raid 0 volume, everything installed automatically (I selected install non-free but NOT the updates, they can be done once Kubuntu is on the hard drive) and Grub was installed seamlessly to the MBR of the Raid drive.
Location of Seagate DiscWizard on the Ultimate Boot CD: starting at the main menu (if you go to a wrong menu item by mistake, hit Escape and then Enter, it wil take you back to the last menu)....HDD/Installation/DiscWizard V11.0.8326 (takes about a minute to load)/Tools/Add New Disc (I chose XP SP1 or higher, worked for me, let DiscWizard format the partition as NTFS, the Kubuntu disk will automatically reformat it to Ext 4 afterwards). Exiting DiscWizard when you are done immediately shuts the computer down, this is normal.
One final note, I was using Linux Mint 10 for a while on the Raid but it had a restart bug (software restart from the menu), it would knock the first drive of the Raid out causing a fail so I used to shutdown and use the physical power button to boot back in to Mint, why am I telling you this? Because the bug is gone in Kubuntu 12.04, I am happily restarting from the menu again and no Raid fail.
So not only do I have a smokin' fast installation, it's pretty and LTS as a bonus, whoohoo, no more messing around for FIVE YEARS! lol
Location of Seagate DiscWizard on the Ultimate Boot CD: starting at the main menu (if you go to a wrong menu item by mistake, hit Escape and then Enter, it wil take you back to the last menu)....HDD/Installation/DiscWizard V11.0.8326 (takes about a minute to load)/Tools/Add New Disc (I chose XP SP1 or higher, worked for me, let DiscWizard format the partition as NTFS, the Kubuntu disk will automatically reformat it to Ext 4 afterwards). Exiting DiscWizard when you are done immediately shuts the computer down, this is normal.
One final note, I was using Linux Mint 10 for a while on the Raid but it had a restart bug (software restart from the menu), it would knock the first drive of the Raid out causing a fail so I used to shutdown and use the physical power button to boot back in to Mint, why am I telling you this? Because the bug is gone in Kubuntu 12.04, I am happily restarting from the menu again and no Raid fail.
So not only do I have a smokin' fast installation, it's pretty and LTS as a bonus, whoohoo, no more messing around for FIVE YEARS! lol
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