Hello all.
I'm attempting to install Linux onto my desktop system.

Here's the skinny on the setup

Asus A7V333 with Promise PDC20276 Raid controller
1.5 GB Ram
ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500
SB Audigy Platinum
2 WD120 GB ATA HDD
Plextor 5224 CDRW
Plextor 708A DVD±RW
Pioneer A06 Slot loader DVD
Compaq "old" NIC

That's about it

Anyway, here's my diliema
Attempting to install SuSE 9, with the driver disk from Promise's web site (specifically for SuSE 9) works fine to do the install, but after 3 attempts (each of which took over 3 hours) it comes up with no mouse/keyboard, which is somewhat odd because they both worked fine during the entire install process.) So, I reboot the box, and SuSE no longer loads, claiming to have issue with getting access to the / partition.

I do have XP installed as well, and the drives are in a 240GB raid 0 stripe.
As much as I'd love to completely ditch XP, my wife needs various apps and I need stuff that wine won't run well, (like illustrator and office 2003)

So, no big deal, I tried Red Hat 9, once again using the driver disk from promise's web site, for RH9. Red Hat won't recognize this as a valid driver disk for "my hardware". It proceeds to load the install wizard, but once it gets to the partitioning, it claims there's no hard drives available, and bombs out.

So, I'd like to recompile the driver (Promise offers partial source, which can be compiled for whichever distro you need) but I have doubts about loading the driver after Linux installed, since I can't get it installed. I plan to get a VM running with RH9 and compile the driver there, but I would like to create a RH9 style driver disk, so that I can install once I've got the driver.

Any ideas/help anyone can offer here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, much.

JMR

Buy another HD and put your linux on that.