[ILUG] intel ich5 sata raid controller

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

anyone got any experience of installing onto one of these.  I've never used
RAID or SATA directly myself so it's all a little new to me and being over
the phone ain't helping much either.

The guy I'm helping has done/seen the following:

* some funkiness with Partition Magic to "hide" the windows partition and
creating an ext2 & a swap partition
* popped in a Mandrake 9.2 install cd 
* after booting the 2.4.22-10 kernel he gets asked which scsi/raid
controller he'd like it to use.
* scratched his head.

This is all new to me but my googling informs me that this is in fact
software raid not hardware as he was led to believe.  I understand that
patches were made to 2.4.22 to first support this controller.  Is this
correct?  I also notice talk of a sub-driver "iswraid" for the 2.4.22 which
stands for "intel software raid".

Can anyone shed some light? 

Gavin