I moved my HTPC from Sage to KnoppMyth (yay), and the last step was moving my hardware RAID 1 array (formatted NTFS) over to store important files. In windows, the machine saw ONE drive, but KnoppMyth sees TWO drives.

I mounted each one (/dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1) to mount points in /mnt and only one (/mnt/sda1/) showed the current files on the drive, the other showed nothing.

So, I repartitioned /dev/sda1 for Linux and formated XFS. Now, I can dump my video files onto the drive, but is there a way to ensure they are being mirrored (aka RAID 1)? Is it even possible for linux to bypass the raid controller and write to a single disk?

Thanks in advance...

More info about the brand and make of the RAID controller may help. I'm not sure if it truly is a hardware RAID controller. In that case it would have it's own "BIOS" where you can define if and how disks are paired. Depending on how things are paired the OS would only see the array and not the individual disks.
From what you describe I'd guess you used the software RAID functionality of Windows to mirror both disks. The controller doesn't do RAID for you. You can do the same in Linux. There are many howto's on software RAID in Linux.
If you have /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 then I'd guess these are individual disks. Going through the dmesg output should confirm that with the make and model of the disks. If RAID is indeed enabled on the controller, then you'd see the controller mentioned in the dmesg output and the number of logical drives defined.

The motherboard is a AOpen AX4SPE Max II which uses the Intel 865PE + ICH5 chipset. It has a BIOS configuration system, which is how I set up the RAID 1 Mirror. Before LILO takes over, it lists the two drives as a RAID 1 arrray. Its just confusing that I see two devices in /dev.

I have two different board with built in RAID (Asus A7N8X Deluxe - silicon images controller and Soyo KT-880 Dragon 2 - ALI and Nvidia raid - two controllers) and even though the raid is described as hardware raid it isn't exactly. I have gone through the same problem that you are describing without much luck.

I have tried all of the drivers and can sucessfully install one one drive and then use two more drives in a mirror set. When I boot I will see a hardware mirror set (in the raid bios) but then as soon as I get booted into Linux I see independent drives. Eventhough I have seen two drives I went ahead and created my file system and then copied stuff to it. For some reason I only get data copied to one drive and the other is left blank.

I think that the system is actually a software raid with some hardware acceleration. Due to this fact I think linux is loading drivers to use the Raid controller as a standard disk controller but it's not actually loading the drivers to use it in Raid.

I am subscribing to this thread in hopes that someone else can shed some light to make this work.

I've been looking at the same stuff but using a different controller. What I've found so far is the utility "dmraid" http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dmraid/, I haven't been able to make it do everything I want just yet but I think that's more because I've been using Fedora and can't get a handle on how to make the kernel behave [/url]