I'm soooo confused (1st linux install)

[Krum]

Ok, here goes (ahem) ----I'm trying to install SuSE 8.2. First, I can't seem to create a FAT32 partition on my win XP Pro NTFS disk. I believe that this is because I have a SATA RAID 0 and can't seem to find a partioning prog that will create a FAT32 partition on this kind of setup. I've tried Partition Magic 8.0 and Acronis Partition Expert. Does anyone know of a prog I can use? Or am I stuck with reformating my whole drive into FAT32?
Second, I'm trying to use the SuSE 8.2 Live Eval diisk which requires you to boot from the cdrom, but it basically just starts out, gets to the "checking disks" part of the install and the screen goes blank and hangs there. I'm presuming that this is because of prob #1.
Third, I've downloaded the RAID driver for linux from the manufacturer, but how can I install it if I can't boot to linux without it?
I know this is a lot of stuff, but I would greatly appreciate some insight on any or all of this situation. Thanks!

[originel]

To answer number one...is your NTFS partition taking up the whole disk? if so Partition magic is the only program i know of that can resize a partition (and even then it is extremely limited). What are your intentions wit the FAT drive? if you are planning on creating a linux partition with it i would recommend using reiserfs or ext2 for that. I would recommend tho just backing up your files and formatting the whole drive.

When the suse startup "hangs" does it give any information to the screen? or does it simply say "checking disks" and nothing else? have you tried any other distro's? Knoppix has a cd-based version as well. this will at least tell you if it's just a wierd suse thing or an issue with your hardware.

oh btw...what raid controller are you using? as for installing the driver if you can't boot the cd...well...you can't. so we'll have to figure out what it's doing first.

[CMonster]

You are running RAID 0 on SATA drives?

You may find some difficulty locating a partitioning tool. I believe it is difficult enough to repartion RAID array on the fly, and SATA is pretty new technology.

You will find also that current Linux distributions have little or no out-of-box support for SATA at present. One suggestion might be to add an ATA drive, install Linux on that, install the Linux boot loader on a floppy.

BTW - I do not believe you can "install" SuSE Linux from the live evaluation CD.