I've got an MSI Z87-G45 mainboard, 3 750GB Samsung SATA HDDs in RAID-0, totalling just over 2TB of usable space, 32GB of RAM. I'm trying to set up a dual-boot system: Windows 7 x64 for a few games, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for all the rest.
The RAID was just created before the installation of Windows using the RAID utility of the mainboard. I created a 500GB partition with the Windows installer on the beginning of the drive. I've left the rest clean, but saw a 47.9GB partition was added to the end of the drive (unused space that I just can't access for anything - I suppose this is normal). I continued installing and updating and everything went fine.
The I proceeded to install Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS. I have downloaded the latest iso image and used Win 7 DVD USB creator to put the image on a USB stick.
At boot, I selected "Try before installing" and once the OS loaded, I clicked on the app to install Ubuntu on hard disk.
At first, I selected to install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7, but I'm getting this error message:
So I continued with "Something Else"
I created the needed partitions for swap and / on the remainder of the space, but I kept being greeted with the same error. Somehow, the partitions got written anyhow, and the installation proceeded... until Grub. I had forgotten to change the installation of Grub from /dev/sda to /dev/mapper/isw_eceefjedd_RAID-0, so I did, grub was supposedly written. I restart and everything just goes straight back to Windows 7.
Here's me thinking it had something to do with that partition error... so I try to create the partitions in Windows Disk Management. Perhaps somehow magically Windoze would solve the partition issue.
I created a 16GB partition for swap and the remainder of the space for /. Neither were formatted or assigned a drive letter. I reboot back to the Linux installer. Same procedure, Install along Windows 7 and again, same error about the starting sector number. Again I use "Something Else", assign swap to the 16GB partition, / to the 1.5GB partition and select to format it in ext4. I also remembered to install Grub in /dev/mapper/*RAID-0 from the dropdown.
The installation continues without errors. I get prompted with a "Continue testing or restart". When I restart ... immediately back to Windows.
So, what next? How can I solve these issues? I've spent about 20 hours updating Windows and installing drivers. I would really like to avoid doing it over again, but only if I can still fix these issues.