Installation problems with RAID

[airship]

A neighbour is trying to get PCLOS installed and, unlike me, is having serious problems. We think it could be his RAID array. He writes:

Info:-

System:- Old Dell motherboard (celeron 341 32/64 bit) 2GB ram, IDE DVD, 2-500GB sata hard drives
in a mirrored raid array via a PCI 4 port serial ATA host controller card (SIL-3114).
 
Distro:- pclinuxos full monty kde
Bios is set to boot the system from the PCI card, works fine for Windows XP and some other linux distros.
I'm trying to install by booting from a DVD to existing linux partitions. root 15GB, home 55GB & swap 5GB.
Boots to a black screen and a boot prompt that says can't find image and hangs at a boot prompt.
Tried at the boot prompt, "vmlinuz raid=autodetect", lot of screen text then just hangs at nothing.
 
These drivers supplied with the PCI card:-
Fedora C2 32bit
Fedora C2 64bit
Fedora C3 32bit
Fedora C3 64bit
Fedora C4 32bit
Fedora C4 64bit
Linux 64bit
 RedHat
 SuSE
RedHat EL30 32bit
RedHat EL30 64Bit
RedHat Ent40 32bit
RedHat Ent40 64bit
RedHat Ent41 32bit
RedHat Ent41 32bit
SuSE Ent90 R551 32bit
SuSE Ent90 R551 64bit
SuSE Pro92 32bit
SuSE Pro93 32bit
SuSE Pro93 32bit
 
I wouldn't know which to use or when and how to install one.
 
Can any body help a newbee?
 
It seems that my raid array is not seen, can't find any disks.
 

[AS]

Hello airship,

is this post related ?
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,92616.msg776643.html

Actually I don't know if that mirrored subsystem is supported from PCLinuxOS, however would suggest to reconsider the RAID mirroring option: a software mirroring will affect the overall performance because of raid layer and particularly will affect the write operations, resulting in a slower system.

Other than this, mirroring is aimed to increase fault tolerance, but overall,  using "software mirroring" (vs. hw mirroring), is likely to increase the chance of a fault/failure. My 2 cents humble opinion.

AS

[mad-hatter]

Hello AS,

Yes the two posts are duplicated.

Thanks for your comments on raid mirroring.

I only use it in case of disk failure, I used the system on an old Gigabyte board, had a disk failure
and was able to carry on working, then put in a new drive and rebuild.

I relied to the other post.

Regards