Software RAID

I'm aware that Fedora 9 can set up partitions and do a software RAID with mdadm before installing the operating system.

The problem with Fedora is I can't seem to get my wireless network card to work, and my video card is not supported.

Can windows vista do some kind of software RAID before installation?

no windows can only do it once windows is installed and many dont like it cause if windows goes bad so does your raid setup.

I have heard Windows software RAID is very slow. In another thread there were two people who had to resync a drive back in to their RAID 5 arrays and it took over 8 hours (500GB drives) for both people on different system configurations. I did this once with my 500GB drive base array using mdadm and it only took 2.5 hours, and the array was still very usable and responsive while the third drive re-synced.

What video card are you using and have you tired ndiswrapper for the wireless card?

many (i think all actually) distro's can use mdadm.
As for the wireless, I have gotten a wide variety of chipsets to work with ndiswrapper as have others here. You could always ask for help.

I would rather spend time helping someone with linux then send them towards vista lol... i have a personal grudge

The video card I'm using is an ATI Radeon HD 3850. (I know probably won't get much support on ATI)

For my wired network I disabled NetworkManager and turned on the network service.

Is this correct to get ndiswrapper:


Now how do I use ndiswrapper? I'm using a WMP54GS Wireless-G PCI Adapter with SpeedBooster

ok well first that is the correct YUM statement if ndiswrapper is in your repo.

If you have rpmforge in your repo then you should be fine.
What you now need to do for ndiswrapper is go and get the windows EXE for your wireless card and extract it


for that you have a couple of options
First there is WINE, if you have it installed run the EXE in wine and change where it extracts to a more convienent place.

Second if you dont like that you can try a program called cabextract

third you can try the following code which might work depending on how you have fedora setup


I also sometimes save myself time if i have quick access to a windows machine and extract the files to a flash drive.

In any rate, the next thing you do is point ndiswrapper at the .inf file i believe

for my card the code looks like this

give this a whirl and let me know how it turns out

additionally here is the link to ATI 32 bit drivers for the 3XXX cards for linux. They also have the 64 bit version. I havent tried these due to only buying nvidia but i would assume this should work

I just installed ubuntu 8.04 and my graphics card and wireless network card just worked right from the get go. Apparently fedora 9's X server and xorg versions didn't have support from fglrx which is ATI/AMDs driver for linux.

But now with ubuntu I can enable compiz fusion.

Thanks for the help