Re: Ubuntu 64 with RAID 5 install
mdadm is a good choice if you intend to use only linux. If you plan to eventually dual boot with windows (any flavor) and need to access the raid from windows and linux, you would then have to use dmraid (otherwise known as fakeraid).
Apparently you intend to install ubuntu to the raid array. I am too usfamiliar with the alternate cd protocol to be much help to you. I can make some general comments. If you intend to switch to software raid you do need to turn off raid support in bios and erase any meta data already written to the drives before attemting to use mdadm and activating raid5 drives with it (ie sudo dmraid -E). Once you return the three disk to non-raid, straight SATA condition, you should then be able to create and assemble the software raid set.
Whichever way you go, once the raid drives are active, gparted would see the entire raid drive (incorporating all three disks) as unpartitioned space. The same should be true in the command line install with the alternate cd. At that point the basic choices should be to install ubuntu to occupy the entire raid drive, to use only part of the drive, or to manually decide the size and location of a partition to install to. The main thing you have to be carefule of is that the three disks may additionally show up as individual unpartitioned disks. To sucessfully install to raid stay away from those individual drives.
For fakeraid check this out: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto
For software raid, this: http://advosys.ca/viewpoints/2007/04...ubuntu-server/
Installing ubuntu to raid of any flavor has pitfalla. Study the documentation and proceed systematically as advised. Its not too daunting when you know how to proceed, so do post any difficulties you run into.
12.10 Quantal w/grub2/Mint13 installed on raid0, Gigabyte AMD MB, AMD 64x4 CPUs at 3.2GHz, 16 GB ram, HD7770 ATI video, dual boot win7 on 64gb ssd and win8 on 1Tb SATA raid. 13.04 installed on raid0 and ssd
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