Hey guys. I'm trying to install Linux Mint 17.2 along side Windows 10. However I'm not installing it on the same drive. My Win10 install is sitting on two SSDs in RAID 0. The drive I want to install Mint on is just a standard SATA HDD that is also installed in this desktop, not part of any RAID array.

Of course the windows OS is using UEFI mode and I believe GPT. There is an EFI partition on the windows raid array of about 100MB called EFI. Mint cannot see this windows installation and if I go ahead and set up this spare HDD to install Mint I'm guessing that GRUB will not see the windows OS either and I won't be able to boot to Windows.

I can't seem to find any guides out there on how to prepare for an install of this type if you have multiple hard drives and RAID thrown in. I'm also trying to avoid legacy BIOS mode if that's possible here.

My motherboard is an MSI Z97 Gaming 5 if that helps. I'd like to avoid re-installing windows over and over in trial and error over this if possible. Can this be done? My ahci mode is RAID, I'm using UEFI boot mode etc. Can this fly?

It's definitely do-able. It is, of course, best to back up before this kind of adventure, and there is a chance of an unavoidable Windows reinstall, but probably that won't happen. There's two ways to try this. Install Mint on the spare drive, manually add the Windows boot to grub afterwards. Or, if you're particularly paranoid, remove the SSDs first, install Mint on the spare drive, then reinstall the SSDs and figure out grub afterwards. It is not unusual to have to manually fix grub.cfg, in my experience.