I have a new build.

I bought 6 3TB WD drives and activated RAID 5.
I was not able to install Win7.
After loading RAID drivers, building a 2TB volume and copying files, Expanding files, etc. Windows kicked back a message "Windows was not able to prep this computer to boot. Please retry the installation".

After doing this 5 or 6 times, I removed DRV0 from the array, and rebuilt my RAID 5 using the remaining 5 3TB drives.

Windows 7 Ult. installed fine on the single drive (After a 2TB volume was created for what would soon be C and a 200MB partition for whatever).

I plan to install Windows Web Server 2008 R2 on this computer soon, and assume I'll have the same issue installing on a RAID 5.

Does anyone have any advise or seen this problem before?

I really want my OS, Database and Content on RAID 5 for performance, and parity.

Any feed back would be helpful.

Thank you,
RLintz

no native support for Raid 5 in Win7 so you need Raid-card if you want Raid 5.

http://answers.microsoft.com/...eb-4c09-91e7-53781a183ffd

Thank you Marshal. Not the answer I wanted to hear, but at least I know now.

Ha, Mark L. Ferguson sounds about as frustrated as I did...

Guess I'll rebuild the Array when I try to install Web Server 2008 R2. If it doesn't take, I'll return to my current hardware configureation.

Thank you Marshal.

I'm assuming you don't want to use Raid 1+0 ?

yea no1 wants to hear bad news.

No. RAID5 offters parity, so if a drive crashes, I don't loss all my data. As long as I can replace and rebuild the array before a 2nd drive crashes.

RAID 1 / 1+0 = I can only use half my total HDD space.

6 3TB drives..

Space
RAID0 = 18TBs
RAID1+0 = 9TBs (Because of the mirror)
RAID5 = 15TBs (Space X Drives - 1 Drive for parity)

Performance
RAID0 = Speed of 1 drive x total drives
RAID1+0 = RAID0 / 2
RAID5 = Speed of 1 Drive x Number of drives - 1 Drive

If I can get my OS to install on a 6 drive RAID5 then the effects of RAID5 will apply across all volumes created.

Total Space of 15TB after parity (-10% for NTFS).
I would have a read/write speed of about 340 MB/Second with protection from parity.

Well almost :)

RAID 5 you have some overhead to calculate parity bit, and you have drive latency, data bus block and so on for all RAID modes, but almost those speeds you say :)

Get a RAID card with a good XOR engien on it so your CPU don't have to calculate the parity bit for the RAID

Linux Software RAID!