Hi, I've got yet more problems. I have a laptop with 2 SATA HDDs in a RAID setup, which is causing me some trouble. 1) Ubuntu 5.10 won't start on my laptop, unless it's in VMWare/MSVPC. It always hangs on "Starting hotplug subsystem...", and it seems to be a problem with my brand of laptop (Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo M3438G). I want to install it and run it naturally, without a VM being involved. Nobody has a solution, but there is a possible workaround, which brings me to problem 2: 2) The workaround involves using Knoppix to boot up and alter a file in /dev/sdax, and disable the hotplug subsystem. Problem is, Ubuntu's installer asks me to choose which drive to install Ubuntu to. I have a choice of sda, sdb, or sdb1. Which do I use? At the current time, none of these show up in Knoppix, presumably because they're NTFS Windows drives, and they don't want to mount. This gives me the problem of not knowing which of my 2 HDDs is the Windows one with all my stuff on it. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance. ukdeveloper.

All the Linux distros I've seen come with their own partitioning software which you can often use to tell you the type of filesystem and the size of it, so if you know for example the drive you want to install Linux on is 20GB then look for a drive with that size and use that.

Im not sure I understand exacly the problem here but...
I assume you have NOT installed ubuntu on any partition yet.
I assume you want to install ubuntu on the other hard drive, the one without windows.
I assume that koppix is unable to bring up the /dev/sda and /dev/sdb device files for you.

If this is the case, and I was you, I would boot up windows, download the Tom's rescue disk, and use a program like winrawrite to make a bootable floppy disk.
Then I would boot with that, and see if the /dev/sda and /dev/sdb files are available from there.
Note that /dev/sda is the hard drive, not a partition.
/dev/sda1 on the other hand, is a speciffic partition on that hard drive.

If you have these files available, you can get a detailed look at the size and file system on the different partitions on /dev/sda with the command:
# fdisk /dev/sda
and follow the menu/description from there. As long as you quit the fdisk program with 'q', no changes will be written to your hard drive partition tables =)

Im not sure I understand your problem/intentions so Ill leave it at that for now.