Install Mint 16 and Windows 7 in raid-0.

[nitchmello]

It wasn't very straight forward so I thought I would outline what worked for me.
Currently my clevo laptop is dual booting windows 7 with mint 16 on a bios raid-0 array of two msata ssd's with good results.

Step 1:
[*]Boot computer and immediately enter raid bios (Ctrl-i on some systems).
[*]Create a single raid 0 array from your drives (2 or more).
[*]Verify array is created and reboot with your windows 7 installation disk installed.

Step 2:
[*]During windows installation, choose to make your own custom partition's.
[*]The first partition to make is 500MB (500 'Megabytes' should be enough for the linux boot loader).
[*]The next partition to create is for windows, set the size you want making sure to leave ample for your linux partition. (I created the windows partition here because windows likes to create it's own bootloader partition right before the main windows partition. So this method puts both boot partitions at the front of the drives.)
[*]Lastly I created my linux partition. This is 4 primary partitions and no room for swap (I will not be using swap with my 32GB ram system). You could potentially create an extended partition on this last partition to have more partitions for swap, etc, when you move to install your Mint 16, but I didn't not test it that way so you would be going on your own.
[*]Finally let windows finish installing. Reboot, and do a few windows updates. The first time I didn't do this and windows refused to load after Mint was installed.

Step 3:
[*]Insert your Mint 16 dvd and boot up. Start the mint 16 installer and when you get to the menu to install along side windows. Choose the custom option.
[*]Here you select your last partition on the drive, set it as ext4, and " / " for the root partition, I chose to format since its fast on SSD.
[*]For the boot loader drop-down You should select the 500MB partition you made that the front of the drive. This can be a little tricky as for my system I had two of every entry, 1 entry didn't have much information and the other had extra text describing it as a linux something-or-other. I chose the 500mb partition that had the most text figuring that linux was able to read more information about the drive. It worked..
[*]At the next screen mint will complain about not having swap. My system has 32GB of memory so I didn't feel the need to use swap. You could potentially delete the big linux partition at the end of the drive and create an extended with extra partitions for swap, but I have no idea how this will affect a successful install result.

Step 4:
[*]After mint 16 install if you didn't get a message about not being able to install a boot loader, you should be able to restart with no issues and have mint 16 boot back up. However, if you did get a message about not being able to install a boot loader, try all the combinations of the 500mb partitions that are listed. Including lastly trying to install to the mapper root (without the 1,2,etc attached at the end). If these all fail, you will have to look up methods to chroot install grub from live dvd, but hopefully you didn't have issues at this point.

Step 5:
[*]Enjoy! My system is getting nearly 1GB/s read write performance on a laptop with 32gb ram. It's shiny!

Sincerely,
nitchmello