The lost partion table of a sata raid.

I am trying to increase the size of my windows (NTFS) partition. Currently it's the only formated space on the drive so enlarging it should not cause to many problems.

my mother board is an asus A8N-E
I have two SATA drives configured into a raid 0 configuration.
my existing partition is ~30.0 GB


the output of :fdisk -l givess


Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain a valid partition table
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 5 will be corrected by w(rite)

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 3824 30716248+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 3825 38913 281852392+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)

Raided(sp?) drives are not managed individually through the use of partition editors. You should use the controller manufacurers (or equivalent) utulities to manage your raid.

Once the drives are configured as a raid, they are managed as a single drive.

FYI Why anyone would use a raid0 configuration in this day and age of monster drives is beyond me. You are just asking for trouble. A failure any where in either of the two drives will trash the entire filesystem. As you have found out, information is striped across both drives, with neither drive haviing enough information to rebuild anything. Raid0 was handy when drives were small and you had a need to support huge files. Not any more.

I am not trying to manage the drives individually. I've been through my manufactures utililites and no where does it have anything to do with creating partitions. The only thing it allows you to do, is create or rebuild arrays composed of entire disk. The partioning and formating of your array is done with what ever program you choose.

"I am not trying to manage the drives individually"

So... your issue is that you are not seeing the logical volume? This would be a function of the raid firmware. If your operating system does not have support for the raid controller, you will only see the physical disks.

The "lost" partition table is certainly there as per your initial post. The partitoning and formatting of your logical volume is done with what ever program you choose.

So how would I get knoppix to support the raid controller?

SATA raid has become an ugly beast as there is no one standard and drivers have to be individually tailored to each chipset. In other words, this may not be possible. You may try dmraid as this project is all about support for existing SATA arrays.

Rereading your initial post, I find that you are looking to increase the size of your ntfs partition. As this is best done with an operating system with naive ntfs support, I suggest that you acquire an application to do it from windoze.

If you insist on trying to do it from knoppix, please post back with the driver you have found to work and your results.