Trouble installing 12.10 64-bit on a RAID 0 configuration P8Z77-V PRO

[sdsdsd2]

/dev/sdd1 is your usb stick I believe. You can't use it as root partition.

If the 12.04 install failed, maybe the ISO is corrupted or the cd/usb.

I'm running out of ideas, you can rarely find so many problems when installing. If you have a good ISO and a good cd/usb, installing the alternate 12.04 on your fakeraid should go just fine.
Stopping at the install software step means something is bothering it. It's not the same like not being able to install grub at the end, it doesn't even continue to that step.

I don't know what to recommend any more.

The ISOs for every Ubuntu installation I have installed have matched hashes with the expected values, so it's definitely not the ISOs (unless a file can be corrupt even if the hashes match...).

How can I check if my flashdrive has poor data quality? A chkdsk?

So, since we're having all these problems, and the problems are likely due to the fakeraid, I was thinking perhaps it would be better for me to get rid of the fakeraid and instead put 2 of the 3 hard drives into a RAID 0. That would leave me with a lone hard drive for the Ubuntu installations. I have some questions about doing this and would like to get your opinion:
1. Would it be better for me to install Ubuntu or Windows 7 first?
2. Would it be better for me to use GRUB or Windows bootloader?
3. Is there a flavor of Ubuntu/linux that would be worth trying out before I do this (perhaps Xubuntu alternate 12.10 would work? http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/daily/current/ )
4. What do you think about this idea?

[darkod]

When you say 'get rid of the fakeraid and put 2 disks in RAID0', what do you mean exactly?

If you want both windows and ubuntu to access the data on those disks, the only choice is fakeraid. If you were using only linux, then software raid is recommended and works much better, but windows can't read that.

So, if you want both OSs to be able to use the array, you will still need to have fakeraid only it will be made up of 2 disks instead of 3.

To be honest running the 3 disk raid0 is probably a bad idea. I hope you are aware that if one disk dies, the data on all 3 disks is completely gone. That's how raid0 works.
You get a slightly faster transfer speed but the risk to the data is much bigger.

You can consider simply having all 3 disks as separate. You still have the same total storage space, but there is less risk for the data. If a disk dies, you lose only the data on that disk.

And by installing on a single disk instead of raid array, your install problems might go away.

The choice is yours whether you want to run 3 separate disks, or one disk for the OSs and a two disk raid0 array.

In any case, it's better to install win7 first and make the partition with the size you want to allocate to it. Leave the rest of the space as unallocated for ubuntu. After that install ubuntu.

For bootloader, I would use grub2 since windows bootloader can't boot ubuntu. It's much simpler, provided the installation goes fine of course.

[sdsdsd2]

When you say 'get rid of the fakeraid and put 2 disks in RAID0', what do you mean exactly?

If you want both windows and ubuntu to access the data on those disks, the only choice is fakeraid. If you were using only linux, then software raid is recommended and works much better, but windows can't read that.

So, if you want both OSs to be able to use the array, you will still need to have fakeraid only it will be made up of 2 disks instead of 3.

To be honest running the 3 disk raid0 is probably a bad idea. I hope you are aware that if one disk dies, the data on all 3 disks is completely gone. That's how raid0 works.
You get a slightly faster transfer speed but the risk to the data is much bigger.

You can consider simply having all 3 disks as separate. You still have the same total storage space, but there is less risk for the data. If a disk dies, you lose only the data on that disk.

And by installing on a single disk instead of raid array, your install problems might go away.

The choice is yours whether you want to run 3 separate disks, or one disk for the OSs and a two disk raid0 array.

In any case, it's better to install win7 first and make the partition with the size you want to allocate to it. Leave the rest of the space as unallocated for ubuntu. After that install ubuntu.

For bootloader, I would use grub2 since windows bootloader can't boot ubuntu. It's much simpler, provided the installation goes fine of course.

I ended up putting 2 drives into a fakeraid and installed Windows 7 on them. I put a 100gb FAT32 partition on the fakeraid to share files between the OSes. I installed 12.10 on the drive not in the fakeraid and then installed GRUB. It's working great! I can get into both Ubuntu and Windows 7 no problem.

Thank you for your help.

PS. The original read speed of the three hard drives in RAID 0 was 240 mb/s. A lone drive (not in RAID 0) had read speeds of 110 mb/s, that's why I had three drives in RAID 0. I am aware of the implications of RAID 0.

[darkod]

Glad it works now. But you should have made the shared partition NTFS, uubntu can read and write to ntfs just fine. FAT32 will have limitations, like not supporting files over 4GB (if you have some big files), etc.

If the partition is still empty you can consider reformatting it as ntfs.