Install on to RAID MBR partition

[blackspy619]

Hello,

First off, I have been around the hackintosh scene casually for a while so I'm not completely new.

 

I own an MSI GT683r-242us, which has an intel i7 2630qm processor and two 500gb hdd. Now, currently my two hard drives are striped in RAID 0 configuration with two partitions, one containing my Windows 7 install, and the other is blank storage. This stripe is set up as an MBR partition table. For me, I am forced to run mac on an external hard drive.

 

Here is what i'd like to know:

 

Is it possible for me to access the storage partition of this set up so I can install OSX natively onto my internal hard drives? Is there a way to get disc utility to see the two partitions the my windows machine sees, instead of 3 different drives that are of inconsistent size when compared to the real partitions.

 

Furthermore, if anyone knows a way to backup my windows OS by mirror imagining it so i can disable RAID and use the two hdds independently, (basically, i dont want to have to reinstall everything[possibly norton ghost? i dont know how it works tho]))

 

 

Thanks a bundle in advance.

[eep357]

Short answer is no, you can run OSX from a software raid as seen here, which works quite well but would not be recognized by Windows. Hardware RAID would require a card that works native in OSX and Windows which aren't cheap. You might be able to split each drive into 2 partitions and make software raid using one partition from each drive, leaving the other 2 for windows OS and data, giving you 2 250gb partitions and one 500gb OSX only software RAID. Not sure off hand if this will work with MBR vs GUID partition scheme or as a hybrid and care would need to be taken that Windows does not rewrite the bootloader

[Rampage Dev]

I did some raid testing last year with a old AsRock Motherboard and I was able to boot into a raided HDD setup but only with a third HDD or USB drive that had just the boot loader installed on it. What I did was the following:

 

1. Created the Raided HDD in the Raid BIOS

 

2. Booted into the Mac OS X install and went to Disk utilities

 

3. Mac OS X saw my drives as two different drives so I reformatted and created a software raid between the two drives.

 

Note you will lose all data present on these HDD when doing this step

 

4. Then I installed Mac OS X to the drives

 

5. Booted off of a USB drive that I mounted internal in the case

 

6. The boot loader see the two HDD as separate so I selected the one and the Boot failed and then selected the other and it booted in

 

7. I was getting the same raid performance as I saw under Windows

 

I ran this setup for about a week and then tore down the setup and I have not tried this again yet but perhaps I can in the future...

[blackspy619]

Hey thanks. I just wanted to know if it was possible. I just really didn't want to reinstall windows and tear down my raid config

[eep357]

Well, yes it's possible but with some caveats as mentioned. No you wouldn't have to kill Windows if you have NTFS cloning software, CopyCatX is only OSX app I know off hand that will clone NTFS volumes. No 3rd boot drive needed unless preferred as Apple software RAID creates a un-raided helper partition on each drive that can be read by bios and Chameleon can be installed there, it is where kernel cache loads from until the RAID drivers are loaded and OSX can then finish booting off the array. My boot times after Chameleon starts are literally a few seconds. I've been doing it this way for a couple years now with no problems. I linked a How-To in my first post if you ever wanted to know more than you probably really want to