Hey friends -

I've read through dozens of possible fixes and don't start a thread casually, but I'm at a loss . . .

I've setup Slack since 3.8, always dual boot with etch, (that is Winddoze) with not trouble. However, trying to get better performance, I put Windoze on a RAID 0 which is comprized of two Seagate 7000.11 series 500 Gb hard drives devided into 5 partitions, 2 primary, 3 on an extended. No problem there. Windoze took the privided Nvidea RAID drivers no problem at the start of the install.

BTW, MoBo A8N-SLi Deluxe, AMD FX60, 4Gb RAM, TurtleBeach sound, NVidea 8600 GT x2 SLI.

So Windoze owns the RAID 0, and I put in another Seagate 7000.9 160Gb hard drive to install Slackware 12.0 on. Everything seems cool on setup until the huge* kernel runs through hard drive recognition and then there is a very strange message about drive /dev/sd* end of file exceeds end of disk, or sum such disaster.

So thinking the problem might correct itself, I run fdisk, setup the swap, a root, and a home partition successfully according to the exit output, but when I try and start the Slackware 12.0 setup, usually a snap, I get a comment that no partitions of type linux are found . . . oh no.

I've tried lots of work around's, but no joy.

I will hand write the message I get when the huge kernel drops off hardware recognition into the select key board to be more specific about the strange /dev/sd* message which appears just before. But unless someone can tell me how to cat the screen to a floppy from the huge kernel output its too much to copy by hand.

So I'll come back in a few minutes to put up a details error description.

Best regards

If this is too hard to solve I'll ditch this dual boot thing, cause I'm upgrading soon and I can use one of my computes as a stand alone Slack box. I'm tired of dual booting between etch and Slack.

Well after to many hours to count, and trying too many work around's, doing an install worked.

Like so many times, what happened is a mystery. I did suspect that something on the lone SATA I intended to install Slack to was corrupt, and the problem didn't even involve the RAID 0 hard drives.

So after wiping once, wiping twice, wiping the SATA ten times, and running the Seagate DOS test utility, perhaps any bad sectors were re-written to some good sectors. I don't know and don't care. All I know is that Slackware 12.0 is now installed.

Thanks for the help, ya'll. lol.