Need help installing Debian with raid0

[adyxion]

Have spent 2 days trying to install Debian on my tower. It has a raid0 array with 2 120 gb drives. Maybe I'm just not doing it right. It seems like its only writing to one drive . . .could someone please walk me through it?

[iwanabeguru]

hardware or software raid ?
Do you have a good quality raid controller or are you using the on-board raid controller?

some thoughts
You can't able to boot from software raid0
linux ignores the on-board fake raid setup and treat the disks as independent disks

[adyxion]

I think it's software raid0; it's on a dell xps system but the bios for the raid comes up at boot before the os . . .

[adyxion]

how can you tell?

[adyxion]

it's a Promise fastrack S150 TX2Plus raid controller

[iwanabeguru]

so it's a discrete card not an integrated on-board raid controller, isn't?

[adyxion]

yes it's an add-on but came that way from factory

[mrrangerman]

Did you build the raid0 array in the controller bios yet? I guess just tell us how you are trying to set this up.

[adyxion]

first I set it to raid0 in the controller bios(it could also be set to raid1 but then I would lose half of my hdd space)
then I partition it as followsboth drives are 120gb)
100mb /boot
balance of sda1 as ext3
first 116gb as ext3
4gb swap file

[adyxion]

I set up the balance of sda1 and the beginning of sdb as raid0
It just doesn't seem to work
I get a grub 2 error everytime