Window's 7 and Areca Raid Card concerns

System Info : Motherboard: ASUS Striker Extreme, 4GB RAM, Intel Core Duo - over clocked - Areca RAID 1220 (8 Channel RAID Card), 7 x 500gb WD Sata II drives connected in Raid 5 configuration. I also have a 3 internal 1x 500 (C drive) and 250 IDE drives, plus an external 750 connected via eSata. I am considering installing Window 7 RC1 32 or 64bit on my Areca Raid 0 drive. I currently have Vista 32bit installed on an internal 500gb Sata drive. Ideally, I would like to dual boot either of these OS's at start-up. Alternatively I could just remap the BIOS to the appropriate boot drive to select the OS I wish to use. Any advice would be appreciated as I am a bit nervous about this (see below). Not all the data (2GB) stored on the RAID drives is backed up due to the cost of buying additional storage. My concerns: 1) Others have reported that having completed the installation of Window 7, their Vista partition would not boot. If this were to happen I would have no access to the internet to research the problem. I always keep a recent backup of my system drive, but if I were to restore this, is there a possibility that Vista would detect W7 on the RAID drive and refuse to boot? 2) To enable Windows 7 OS to access the RAID drives, the appropriate RAID drivers must be installed as part of the OS installation, i.e. Select W7 Custom Install option. If I were to install W7 64bit and the appropriate 64b RAID drivers would this conflict with Vistas 32bit RAID drivers which are already installed? Your thoughts?

There are some very technical things that you are considering doing here… I have just a couple things to say, and you probably won't get much other advice from anyone here. Number one, you want to install an operating system that has not even passed its testing phase yet. Number two, you want to mess with a highly unstable RAID 5 array that could be destroyed in seconds if mishandled, and you don't have your data backed up. Need I say any more? If you are going to do this, BACK UP YOUR DATA! Then, go for it. Do whatever you want. It will be a great learning experience. And, when you determine how it works, you can post back here and let us all know how you did it.

Thanks for your quick response. Yep it would be rather challenging … and risky to try this without a full backup of all my data. Has anyone got a few 1TB hard disks they are not using right now!!!!. Once I have backed up I will go for it …..and post the results. Thanks for your sound advice.

You can buy a 1TB internal or external hard drive for under $100 now days from places like NewEgg or NextTag.

How did it go? I've got Windows XP Home, Windows XP Pro 64, Vista Business, and Windows 7 RC1 in a quad boot setup (installed in that order too), didn't have any issues really but this was not on RAID. I kept each OS on a seperate Hard drive, and used easybcd to assist in setting up the boot menu. With this setup it was a little confusing to start with working out which drive was controlling the OS mapping, but wasn't rocket science and microsoft actually has some useful kb's on it. And about installing an OS that hasn't passed it's testing stage… did this help vista? hehe (maybe vista was the testing stage) I use Windows 7 more than I use vista and find it more stable… just don't muck with folder security settings too much is my advice.