I have dual boot Win 7 with Mint 15 - Mate 1.6 running with no problem. I have been trying to get dual boot with Win 7 and Mint 15 - KDE RC with no luck. Eventually I tried KDE on its own and even that will not load. Problem is always at the same point. I have 2 128gb SSD drives connecting with SATA 6. The raid, set in BIOS, gives a 'C' disk of 225 gb. The components of the raid group are sda and sdb. Installing KDE always tries to load grub on sda; one component of the raid, not to the raid drive. In setup I set load grub to disk5, that is the logical drive with /boot. At the end of the installation it says something like "Critical Failure - unable to load grub to sda" and the installation fails. I did not tell it to load grub to sda!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Loading Mate on the same setup also has a problem with grub but asks if I want to load it manually. I say yes, it does not crash the install, I boot into Windows and run ECBCD. Everything then works.
Partitionmanager cannot see the raid disk, only its components. Gparted sees the components and the raid disks.
I am rather new to this so any help - please.

What sort of RAID is this? It is very likely "software" RAID, which quite possibly is not supported by Linux - or if it is, then support is only available in certain versions, or only if a distribution has included drivers which are not shipped as part of the mainline Linux kernel.

In this instance, you would be better to ask such questions in a distribution forum - as only they can help you with their installer (which is usually distribution specific, and is most definitely not provided by KDE).

As I said, I am running Win 7 dual booting with Mate desktop on Mint, so Linux runs on this machine. I have loaded Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mint with Cinnamon on this in the past. Loading them alone is straight forward, for dual boot there is often a problem with Grub but at the point where Grub load fails they give me the option to load it manualy. I do this with ECBCD in Windows and it all works well.

KDE will not load alone nor dual boot with Windows - grub will not load and the install then cancels, no option to rescue it as the other distros offer. The KDE Partitionmanager cannot see the raid disks either but Gparted can see the raid disks??!!

I am not sure what you mean by the Raid is 'software'. It loads before the BIOS and is an INTEL product on the motherboard; it is 'firmware' so you could argue it is software. its Raid0 by the way, two disks striped. The 'C' disk is two SSDs on SATA6. The 'D' disk is two 500gb 7200rpm spindles as RAID0 on SATA3.

Most consumer motherboard provided RAID is actually "software" RAID, and is usually implemented, at least in part, by drivers loaded by the operating system. In this case you are lucky and it appears the Intel RAID method is supported by Linux.

Please be aware that KDE is just the desktop environment - it has very little to do with the actual installation of the system, which is usually handled by distribution tools. As for the KDE Partition Manager - it is quite possibly not aware of LVM (which is likely how support for the Intel RAID controller is implemented in Linux).

In this case, you are experiencing a problem with the Mint installer, so all I can recommend is that you try another distribution (such as Kubuntu or openSUSE) which may handle the RAID controller in a more reliable fashion in the installation phase.

What bcooksley says makes sense, what doesn't make sense, however, is how you managed to install it in the first place on your computer!

Seadart wrote:Eventually I tried KDE on its own and even that will not load.

How? This is definitely the way to go, no reason to have two Linuxes if all you want to try is another desktop environment. Normally you'd just do

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sudo apt-get install kde

or some such depending on your distro, log out of X, select a KDE session in your login manager (yours is likely to be gdm) and log in.