Hi,
An utterly newbie question and I apologise in advance & profusely for my ignorance.
I've picked up all the necessary DVD's & install software, but I've hit a glitch on the install. I have a SSD boot disk and RAID5 main dump. I would like to dual-boot my system leaving Winblows on the SSD alone and installing CentOS directly onto the RAID (Currently set as Raw format, and the RAID controller is set as a bootable option so should work). The installer is asking for drivers, and here's where I've hit the wall. I've copied all my drivers to local disks (both SSD & RAID) and tried the driver CD as well. It's not playing. I can't find my chipset in the pre-installed list either.

So - Embarressing question time: How do I get this to install? Clearly I've overlooked something here but what? Is installing directly onto a RAID5 even possible?

Many thanks in advance,

Tom.

Welcome to the CentOS fora. Please see the recommended reading for new users linked in my signature.

You can certainly leave Windows on the SSD, but if that is the boot device you may need to allow CentOS to take over the MBR, or you might have to change to BIOS boot order each time you want to boot alternate OSs.

Unless you have a separate true hardware RAID controller (read expensive) you almost certainly are using the FakeRAID/HostRAID on the motherboard or an add-in card. Bad idea, and CentOS cannot boot from a RAID5 except for a true hardware RAID. Please see the Wiki RAID articles:
Setup a Software RAID on CentOS 5
Convert a CentOS System to RAID 1
Install on Partitionable RAID1

Although the articles need updates for CentOS 6 they are still generally applicable.

I am not sure what you mean about "copied all my drivers to local disks (both SSD & RAID) and tried the driver CD as well" but if you mean Windows drivers and CD that came with the system, those are likely worthless for CentOS. A good test would be to download the CentOS-6.2 LiveCD or LiveDVD to test hardware compatibility, and to allow you to provide more information about your system.

Magic, thanks.

I was afraid of something like that. Thanks for the reply, I appreciate your time

T.

You are welcome. Please let us know if you have resolved your issues, and if so how, so the thread can be marked appropriately per the forum guidelines.