[ale] Compaq raid disk. How do I format?

[Jim Lynch]

I've have an old compaq that a Windows tech added some disks to but had 
no idea what to do to make it work on Linux.  From the dmesg listing I 
found:

Compaq SMART2 Driver (v 2.4.5)
Found 1 controller(s)
cpqarray: Finding drives on ida0 (SMART-2/P)
cpqarray ida/c0d0: blksz=512 nr_blks=8380320
cpqarray ida/c0d1: blksz=512 nr_blks=16768800
cpqarray ida/c0d2: blksz=512 nr_blks=17764320

It looks like he added ida/c0d2 since I have the other two drives 
mentioned in the fstab file.  When I tried to look at one of the 
existing drives with fdisk I found:
Disk /dev/ida/c0d1: 1 heads, 16768800 sectors, 1 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16768800 * 512 bytes

         Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/ida/c0d1p1   *         1         1   2044064   82  Linux swap
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(0, 1, 1) logical=(0, 0, 33)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(500, 254, 32) logical=(0, 0, 4088160)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(500, 254, 32) should be (500, 0, 16768800)
/dev/ida/c0d1p2             1         1    391680   83  Linux
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(501, 0, 1) logical=(0, 0, 4088161)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(596, 254, 32) logical=(0, 0, 4871520)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(596, 254, 32) should be (596, 0, 16768800)
/dev/ida/c0d1p3             1         1    261120   83  Linux
Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(597, 0, 1) logical=(0, 0, 4871521)
Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(660, 254, 32) logical=(0, 0, 5393760)
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(660, 254, 32) should be (660, 0, 16768800)
/dev/ida/c0d1p4             1         1   5687520    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(661, 0, 1) logical=(0, 0, 5393761)
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(1023, 254, 32) logical=(0, 0, 16768800)
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(1023, 254, 32) should be (1023, 0, 16768800)
/dev/ida/c0d1p5             1         1   5687504   83  Linux

Which makes me a bit leary of using fdisk on these drives.  Most of that 
output doesn't make sense to me.  Can anyone point me in the right 
direction so I can learn how to format this new drive?  This is a RH 7.2 
system.  If I understand correctly this is a RAID system.  The new 
drive  is really 2 9 Gb drives configured as a mirror, so I was told.  
Is there some other utility I need to use to make sense of the 
partitioning of the existing drives?

Thanks,
Jim.