Thanks all.  It turns out I *do* have the so-called 'fake-RAID' as was
suggested earlier.   I've made some progress....but....

Greg Freemyer wrote:
> On 6/20/07, Richard Creighton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> At the risk of appearing stupid, which I am willing to do, I recently
>> purchased a ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard with intergral RAID5 hardware
>> controller.   I also purchased 4 WD 400G SATA drives to make a 1.09T
>> (usable space) raid5 array under Linux, SUSE 10.2.
>> <snip>
>
> I don't know about your MB, but most onboard raid is fake-raid.
>
> http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html
> <snip>

This was very helpful

> <snip>
> If you need dual boot to the raid, the you can look at the dmraid
> module and see if your controller is supported.
>
> Greg
<snip>

...tracking down the latest incarnation of *dmraid* from the author's
website, I found a version that supported the NForce/Nvidia chipset.  
Installing it on a 5th drive (my 'Plan B') below:

> Failing that, if I install a 5th drive, an IDE device for the purpose of
> booting the system, is there a driver/module that I could load after
> booting that would allow me to use the hardware raid5 drives rather than
> depend on the software raid?
I get the following results:

ASUS:/home/rich # dmraid -r
/dev/sda: nvidia, "nvidia_baedieei", raid5_ls, ok, 781422766 sectors,
data@ 0
/dev/sdb: nvidia, "nvidia_baedieei", raid5_ls, ok, 781422766 sectors,
data@ 0
/dev/sdc: nvidia, "nvidia_baedieei", raid5_ls, ok, 781422766 sectors,
data@ 0
/dev/sdd: nvidia, "nvidia_baedieei", raid5_ls, ok, 781422766 sectors,
data@ 0


ASUS:/home/rich # dmraid -ay -i
ERROR: device-mapper target type "raid45" not in kernel

I am using 10.2 with the latest kernel available via normal updates that
I am aware of without going to alpha versions.  
Even though this system is a dual-core AMD, I chose to install a 32bit
OS initially to get things set up before tackling the somewhat sparse 64
bit world that I see has even more challanges ahead :(

OS:  Linux 2.6.18.8-0.3-bigsmp i686
  System:  openSUSE 10.2 (i586)
  KDE:  3.5.5 "release 45.4"

My question now appears to be, what do I have to do to get the 'raid45'
target type error resolved?   I don't want to use a 'lower' raid level
than raid 5 because with 1Tb of space, I want very badly to have the
redundancy offered by that mode without an unnecessary redundancy of
hardware backup required by 'lower' raid levels.   As the fake-raid
supports level 5, I'd like to use it if possible.

My next goal would be to be able to install and boot using the
raid5/dmraid techniques suggested in the above URL, but for now, I'd be
content with solving the 'raid45' error.

Thanks in advance.
Richard

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