ASUS P5W DH Deluxe - dual boot XP/Ubuntu. Am I crazy?

[hawse1978]

Hi

I have an ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard with 2x320gb Seagate SATA drives. I would like to dual boot XP and Ubuntu (ideally Hardy), preferably using RAID 1. Failing that, as separate disks, or if all else fails, as a single large drive.

I have tried heaps of different settings, swapping the SATA ports on the board, changing the jumpers and twiddling with BIOS, and I think I'm going crazy.

Has anybody managed to configure this setup with this hardware? If so, I would be most grateful if you could share:

1) which SATA ports on the board are being used,
2) your bios settings.
3) the RAID_SEL jumper settings.

I shall be keeping my fingers crossed!

Cheers all!
Mike

[executive]

i also have a similar setup and would like to know as well!

[hawse1978]

Finally managed to get this working. For info, I have 2x Seagate SATA drives plugged into SATA1 and SATA4. The RAID_SEL is in the default RAID1 (safe) mode, though it is not actually acting RAID 1, they are shown as separate disks configured in BIOS. My DVD drive (configured as IDE Master) is connected to PRI_IDE (next to floppy controller).

Steps:
* Installed XP - the setup identified both drives, but claimed to be unable to access the second. This was confirmed when I logged in and checked under Computer Management, and only one disk was detected.
* Installed Hardy - both drives found, partitioned, grub on hd0. Hardy sees both drives.

Dual boot working fine

BIOS settings to follow, but I think JMicron support can be disabled with this combo of SATA ports, and IDE Configuration needs to be in AHCI mode... will check next time I reboot.


[Current issues with board]
optical out not working, but onboard 5.1 (analog) is fine
lsusb hangs, but I think this is a Hardy problem

[Untested]
wireless
firewire
DH remote
eSata

Hope this helps!

Mike

[Cornova]

I have a similar setup and noticed that under Ubuntu I can see the hard drive that XP is on, but under XP I cannot see the hard drive that Ubuntu is on (under mycomputer).

[hawse1978]

Beware! After reading through my notes, I am a bit concerned now that XP doesn't see the second drive. maybe XP *is* trying to use RAID 1, but Ubuntu isn't. haven't booted into XP since installing Ubuntu, and don't want to for a while in case recent file changes I made get lost.

Please be careful. Oh, and if yopu try it and XP destroys the Ubuntu drive, please tell me!

[Cornova]

I have had this setup for a month and there haven't been any problems so far. The only reason it concerned me was when I updated to Hardy and had some problems - I thought I'd have to move files back to XP since I planned to wean off of XP and it wasn't working out at first with Hardy.

[hawse1978]

well it's a relief that the XP install didnt try and RAID over Ubuntu, but i know what you mean about Hardy issues. I'm having a hell of a time trying to get my DVICO TV card working. All the tutorials so far are for 7.10. Also, my usb drive isn't being recognised for some reason. i know that usb works, because I managed to get my webcam working.

My PC is currently flat on its back with its guts out, so i might just try the tv card in another PCI slot and see what happens. unfortunately, the troubleshooting articles ask for info from lsusb, but that doesn't work on mine - just hangs. i believe this is a Hardy issue as well.

[shifty_powers]

Beware! After reading through my notes, I am a bit concerned now that XP doesn't see the second drive. maybe XP *is* trying to use RAID 1, but Ubuntu isn't. haven't booted into XP since installing Ubuntu, and don't want to for a while in case recent file changes I made get lost.

Please be careful. Oh, and if yopu try it and XP destroys the Ubuntu drive, please tell me!

heh, bit of a misunderstanding on your part there.

the raid you are using is transparent to either operating system as it is handled by a chip on the motherboard.

what windows/ubuntu will see is the PARTITIONS that you have set up. windows will not see the ubuntu partition as it is using, probably, the etx3 journalling file system, which windows can't see. (there are drivers for windows to do so, but can't remember what they are called ). However, ubuntu will happily see, read and write ntfs partitions

so, tbh, sounds like everything is working fine.

[hawse1978]

I have to admit, configuriung RAID and this mobo seems like a black art to me, so I'm not surprised I was confused
My concern when adding the "Beware" post was that XP couldn't see the drive through the "Computer Management" control panel in administrative tools. When I had Gutsy partition previously (RAID 0), Computer management at least *saw* the disk, even if it couldn't read the filesystem to assign drive letters.

With Gutsy, I used the Ext2IFS(http://www.fs-driver.org/) drivers to map ext3 partitions in explorer, but if XP doesn't know the disk exists, even that wouldn't work.

[shifty_powers]

I have to admit, configuriung RAID and this mobo seems like a black art to me, so I'm not surprised I was confused
My concern when adding the "Beware" post was that XP couldn't see the drive through the "Computer Management" control panel in administrative tools. When I had Gutsy partition previously (RAID 0), Computer management at least *saw* the disk, even if it couldn't read the filesystem to assign drive letters.

With Gutsy, I used the Ext2IFS(http://www.fs-driver.org/) drivers to map ext3 partitions in explorer, but if XP doesn't know the disk exists, even that wouldn't work.

what do you mean by it doesn't see the ubuntu partition?

does it not show up in my computer? what happens when you go control panel>administrative tools>disk management? what size does this report, (and not just for the xp partition. you should see that and then some unidentified space after that on the disk).

either way, xp cannot just overwrite anything on the ubuntu partition. xp does not control how the raid array works, the raid controller on the motherboard does that, nicking a few cpu cycles in the meantime btw.

i'm not going to make any gaurantees of course, but i honestly do not see anyway in which xp could do anything to your ubuntu partition in this situation...