Infinite Disorder

I have an ECS C51GM-M motherboard and I run two 500GB hard drives in RAID-0 to give me 1TB of fast storage. The problem with this is that when you try to install any form of windows, it doesn’t see any available disk. There are ways around this-

1. When installing XP, you press F8 and then use a floppy (my motherboard doesn’t have a floppy connector). Or you can slipstream the RAID drivers onto the windows XP disk.
2. When installing Vista, you can insert a USB or CD with the drivers on it (this is how I installed last time).
3. With Windows 7, the drivers that I used when installing Vista no longer worked.

Here I am, giving windows one last chance to win me back before I convert everything to linux (or os x!) and its failing miserably. Luckily I figured out a relatively easy fix. It works because Vista and Windows 7 use the same bootloader.

Start with a working Vista machine. In my case I had Vista on a single partition on my 1TB RAID array.
Next, create some space for Windows 7, 16GB is the absolute minimum. Boot off a gparted CD to do this, if you have a large partition like mine, it will take 30 minutes or so to shuffle things around.

Boot into Vista and create a simple volume on your new partition. Now is the part that took me forever to figure out: Run the Windows 7 installer while your still in Vista! I usually never do this but in the case, its the only way. When it reboots, boot from the hard drive and you will see ‘windows 7 installation’ in the bootloader list.

I’m glad this is easy but I’m still curious why didn’t it work when I tried to use the drivers in the installer. And why can’t they bundle the same drivers which I get in any linux distro?

I’m not sure if I feel proud for figuring this out on my own or dumb for not figuring it out sooner.