Finally got a Mac Pro with SW RAID to Boot Camp

After days of searching and failing on different ideas on how to get boot camp to work with OS Xs' SW RAID, I finally did it. This is how I did it and I've read other ways to do it, but this is the only one that worked for me. Just thought I would share for anyone who was interested.

After I got my Mac Pro, I instantly used up all 4 SATA slots to setup RAID 0 through the Disk Utility application. I was bummed to find out that I couldn't boot camp in this configuration, so off to the internet I went.

First I took all 4 drives out of my Mac Pro and inserted a new drive that was not a part of the RAID into slot 1. I booted my machine with the OS X install disk in it, erased the hard drive, and installed OS X. Nice, fresh install.

I then boot camped the machine like you would in any other normal circumstance.

I powered down the Mac and took out the HD from slot 1. I placed the hard drive into the extra optical bay and hooked it up using that free SATA cord. If your thinking why didn't I just use this SATA slot in the first place, I did already try that. The Windows installer didn't like the fact that it was in that location for some reason, so I had to restart the entire process again after switching the HD to slot 1.

I would think that you could also set up this HD as an external hard drive at this point, but I'm not sure. I just used the empty optical bay.

After placing the HD in the optical bay, I put back my 4 HDs into their original positions.

Restarted the Mac and held down the option key. Unfortunately you will have 2 installs of OS X on you machine, but to me that didn't matter. As long as I had an option to boot into Windows. You only lose about 20 gigs on the HD you boot camped.

And that was that. Spent days looking for a workaround and finally got it. Sharing this for those that are interested, but perform at your own risk.

VirtualRain said:

Thanks for sharing... but I think it's fairly well understood that when running OSX SW RAID0 you need to have Windows installed on a separate stand-alone drive.

BTW, can't you just install Windows on the separate drive without installing OSX and using Bootcamp to partition it? This seems like an unnecessary extra step. But I haven't actually done this yet myself so I could be mistaken.

It is good to know that Windows won't install on a drive connected to the optical bay.

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When you run boot camp, it will only let you install windows on the partition you booted from. So when I boot from my RAID, boot camp just simply states that its not supported and you have no choice but to exit. So that's the reason for installing OS X on the stand-alone drive, I have to launch OS X from it in order to boot camp it.

I agree that its well understood that a stand-alone drive is well known, but its how I got windows on that drive that took me days to accomplish.

VirtualRain said:

Yes, but I still think you made it more difficult than it needed to be. I believe you could have just pulled your RAID drives, put the empty drive in bay 1 and installed windows on it directly. As far as I know, there was no need for OSX and bootcamp in order to get Windows installed on that drive. Bootcamp is just a partition tool that enables you to install Windows on a partition that's also got OSX... in your case, you didn't need a partition or another installation of OSX so bootcamp was completely unnecessary. Am I correct or is there something I'm missing? I haven't actually done this, but from what I've read around here, this is how you would do it in the most efficent way possible.

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Ahh, ok, I see what you are getting at. You are probably correct. I didn't try it that way because I went under the assumption that boot camp was required for a Windows installation. If not, then I don't see why that wouldn't have worked.