The motherboard-based "FakeRAID" has been known to cause issues installing and running linux for years. Generally speaking, only Windows + special drivers usually work on those motherboard-based controllers with the drives configured in a RAID configuration. (Google "fakeraid linux" for more info)
If you wish to install linux I'd change your SATA ports from RAID to AHCI in BIOS and go from there.
However, it sounds like you already installed Windows on the computer... If so, that would break that configuration
Linux has some pretty good software-based RAID using the mdadm utility, which can be configured through most graphical linux installation utilities. It's incompatible with Windows, though, so if you're wanting to have linux
and Windows on that system you aren't really going to be able to have them both on there in a mirrored RAID configuration unless you purchase some kind of hardware-accelerated RAID controller that supports both operating systems (and they're usually not inexpensive).
It's one of the more unfortunate incompatibilities between the two OS's, but it's not the fault of linux; moreso it's the lack of the fakeRAID manufacturers not creating drivers / releasing info to make them available for linux.
If you're just exploring linux for the first time and seeing how things work, and you want to keep your hard drives in a RAID1 mirror, perhaps installing something like VirtualBox (
https://www.virtualbox.org/) or VMWare Player (
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/fre...are_player/7_0) on your existing Windows installation would make more sense; either would allow you to install linux in a virtual machine running on Windows, and you could still play around with it there.
Even better, you could try all sorts of different linux distributions (not just Mint), and find the one you like the most! All without endangering your existing Windows.
strick
