That's the problem all of us face. It's a 'chicken and egg' problem. What I do, is get out one of my spare 'junk' hard disks that I keep for this purpose... Old, slow, and just barely big enough to hold a basic Linux install. I install onto the junk hard disk, then compile a fresh kernel, with ataraid built in. Then I boot that kernel and partition/format the RAID, then copy the whole install off the old disk and onto the RAID array. It's not easy, and it can be a lot of work, but it seems to be the easiest way to get the job done.You may need to compile a custom kernel before you can access the RAID array. The RAID part of things is done in the driver, and the RedHat kernel appears to not be using the ataraid driver.
One thing I could not resolve. When to recompile the kernel, before installation of RH9.0 or after installation? If recompiling the kernel after installation, RH 9.0 will be installed on the 1st hard drive (the hard drive connected to the 1st slot of the controller as master) leaving the 2nd hard drive empty (hard drive connected to the 2nd slot as master). I have no knowledge to compile the kernel before installation of RH 9.0
Kindly advise. Thanks in advance.
B.Regards Stephen
A shameless plug: Gentoo Linux has ataraid built into the boot CD's kernel. It's rather simple to get Gentoo running on an ataraid, and very easy to check and see if ataraid will talk to your particular chip/card/array, before spending a lot of time installing (You can check right from the boot CD, no install needed!). On the other hand, unfortunately, Gentoo is not quite as newbie-friendly as a nice graphical RedHat or SuSE install is.
