I'm just getting into the more technical side of things.
As I like to say, I am not a complete idiot, some parts were surgically removed..
Anyways, I have a Dell Inspiron 15 N5050. I was increasingly unhappy with Win7, read what I found on the forum, took a crack at switching the OS to Ubuntu. Fail. Had a free offer for Win 8.1 Developer...
I'm already calling it the bad move of '15.
So. Further investigation. Turning off the RAID0 at boot is easy enough. But there is an Intel driver that I have to disable before I turn off the RAID0 in the BIOS. I'm having no luck on my own with that. Suggestions/help?
Or, advice on getting around the new Win 8.1 Sec Protocols to do a dual boot setup? I already have a partitioned drive set-up, etc. Win8 is trying to disable all new software and seems to ignore partition.

I should specify that it is the Trial Developers version. This is a notorious Win fail. I've dealt with a dozen trial and demo versions over the years (my own computers, and friends) and *none* of them work as advertised.

Windows driver settings shouldn't have any effect when you're not using Windows, if that't what you're asking.

Do you actually have a RAID that you'd like to keep or use under Linux? If so, is it a software RAID or a hardware RAID? I know that on my Dell laptop, Windows came with some Intel RAID software, and there was only one physical disk in the computer.

Mm Dell says on their site that they have built-in hardware drivers for the ahci, even if you turn it off in the BIOS, the drivers are still operational if you don't disable them seperately.

I've never heard of anything like that before... sounds interesting. I don't think that's anything to worry about. I'm actually posting from a Dell Inspiron 15R laptop. The only significant issues that I had were installing GRUB for UEFI, which isn't too hard.