Not that the knowledge isn't out there but I have been unable to find good directions on how to install Ubuntu (and other distros) on a separate RAID volume on my machine. So I'm asking today for help.

I want to install Ubuntu on its own volume (not partition) on a 2tb RAID 10 array. My motherboard is an ASUS KGPE-D16 (two AMD 6328 Opeterons), 56G memory with a non UEFI American Megatrend BIOS. My machine has an ARECA 1883xi SAS/RAID host card installed. I want to install Ubuntu on its own separate 250g volume in a 2tb RAID 10 array. I have four Windows OSs on this machine as follows: XPx32 on a Crucial SSD 275g disk, Win10 on a Kinsington 500g disk and four volumes in three separate RAID arrays as follows: Win 7x64 and Win 10 in two separate 500g volumes on the 2tb RAID 10 array. A 1.3tb data volume on a RAID 5 array and a 6tb video volume in a RAID 0 array. All disks connected to the ARECA are are SSD.

I plan to burn the Ubuntu 20.04 distro onto a disk and install from there to the RAID 10 array (1tb free space) since the Vantec UGT-PC345 USB 3.0 card doesn't have drivers for Linux. My plan is to create a 250g Ubuntu volume in the ARECA BIOS (as I did with the other volumes, no running OS) and do a low level format there. The boot loader I'm using is Easy BCD that resides in Win7.

Which of the 3 options should I choose when the Ubuntu install asks?

Been a week, and closing in on a couple of hundred views - I guess that means everyone else is as confused by your description as me.
If your various bits of hardware/firmware truly does present a volume (disk) then the Ubuntu installer will happily use it - choose what you want. Personally I'd just let it default and do its thing. It will install grub to the MBR which EasyBCD should also find ok - been a few years since I used it though.
I'd be inclined to fire up the iso and run in live mode - get into a terminal and run this to see if the devices (volumes) are seen by it.That will exclude all the stupid snaps from the list so it is a little more readable.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for your answer. Yeah, it is a complicated post (yikes!). I did make a mistake in that the RAID set is not where the RAID level is specified. Every volume created in a RAID set can have its own RAID level (IE: 0,1+,5,6). A RAID set is only a defined group of individual HDDs or SSDs. (in my case 8 SSDs defined in the Ereca BIOS as a RAID set).

Yet you answered my question which should have been: "Will Ubuntu see a volume created in an Erica RAID set as an individual disk?"

The motherboard BIOS does see each volume as an individual disk because each volume has its own channel,Id and LUN number. That means that in the KGPE-D16 BIOS I can set which RAID volume will load first because it "sees" the volume as an individual disk.

Thanks much for the code. I will use it to list the diska and reply soon.

Tell me you ran ubuntu 20.04, 21.04 or debian9, 10 on this board KGPE-D16

I have a quanta s215-x12ks 2х12 and it does not start ubuntu 20 not debian 9
debian 8 only
and i want to buy asus KGPE-D16

I installed ubuntu 20.04 on my KGPE-D16 and it installed beautifully without any problems. It even installed the driver for my Vantec (Renasis chip) USB 3.0 card even though there is, to my knowledge, no driver written for Linux. It also recognized my Ereca ARC1883-24ix RAID card and identified the existing windows OS systems and data disks by the designation I gave to each volume.

Ubuntu 20.04 recognizes NTFS file systems even though I haven't mounted any data volumes yet. And I can browse files and folders in them.

You cannot install any OS on a bare raid array that is mdadm managed. The boot portion (/boot) has to be on a non-raid partition then once the kernel is loaded it will access the raid array and handle it from that point.

The fact that you had a hardware raid array allowed it to be seen and accessed as a single device.

You mentioned drivers. Linux does not need drivers for those devices since it is a hardware raid and that is managed at the bios level, not the OS level.

Not so. Ubuntu installed perfectly on a RAID array that was configured for six volumes in a RAID 10. Ubuntu treated the volume I installed it on as though it were a separate disk and installed the /boot /home and /swap files as partitions in that array. I did a low level format in the Ereca BIOS and let ubuntu 20.04 do the rest.

By the way, what is mdadm?

As I said. --
"The fact that you had a hardware raid array allowed it to be seen and accessed as a single device."

mdadm is the kernel managed software raid manager in linux. Since your arrays were not designed that way you were able to use the devices and install with no problems.

Got it. Thanks!