I'm putting together my new rig around an MSI X99A Gaming 7 motherboard and have reached the point where I need to install Windows and Linux.
I don't have an AMD card and no intention to buy graphics cards at the moment (re-using the SLI 770s from the old build while waiting to see what new GPUs are released later this year), so I'm going to dualboot instead of virtualizing with passthrough.
Perhaps when the new cards are released and the whole passthrough thing has matured a bit, I'll give that a go. But not now.
My plan is to put a pair of 256GB 850PROs in RAID 0 and install Windows 8.1 on those. Linux (Mint 17.3) will get a 256GB 950PRO. The installers are already made, Windows drivers are on the Windows stick and I have verified that either OS can indeed be installed.
Normally I'd install Windows, then install Linux and just let GRUB sort everything out.
However on my previous build I had already noticed that the Mint installer simply doesn't see the Windows install on the RAIDed drives. It sees both drives okay, but not the connection between them and as such it can't detect that there is an OS on there.
So before I'd begin to mess around, I was wondering if anyone can tell me the right way to go about this.
Never use RAID 0 for anything other than benchmarks man, You're just asking for your data to die
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Windows will be for gaming only, so in the extremely unlikely event that one of the SSDs dies I won't care much. I'll just find out which one it is, replace it and re-install. No big deal.
All important data is on the NAS anyway and I have triple backups.
Gonna give this thread a few more hours, but I'm really running out of stuff to do.
Linux probably doesn't see the RAID because it lacks the RAID drivers for your mother board. You could try setting the single, non RAID disk as the primary boot disk, then install windows to the RAID but with the bootloader installed to the other disk. Then grub may be able to detect it. Otherwise you may be able to configure it manually but I don't know how to do that.
If nothing else works you could install the windows boot loader on the RAID and GRUB on the other disk and then manually select your boot device when you turn the computer on, it's less than ideal but it should work. It can be a little tricky to get everything installed where it needs to be but it should be possible.
I'd be interrested in which way you went with this. I Did the same basic set up as you myself, but just ignored grub, and use the motherboard boot selector key (F12 on my gigabyte board) when I want to boot into windows. Other than that, just boots into linux for day to day use.
I guess I don't mind the 5-10(?) seconds waiting for intel raid screen to clear.
For now I'm running Windows on one SSD (which is way too full to my liking) and Mint on the other. I'm going to keep it like that until the new AMD cards are released, at which point I'll put Mint on the m.2 ssd, put 2 of the 850s in a software raid inside Linux and put a Windows VM on them.
That makes sense, and lets you spin up the vm if you wanna game. Nice one sir.