Is it safe to boot into windows on a computer that has a linux mdraid partition?

Question

I have a linux computer with 5 hard drives. 1 is used by the OS and the other 4 are RAID5 using mdraid and formatted with ext3.

I would like to start dual-booting the computer by installing windows 7 on a partition on the single hard drive (the one not part of raid). I do not care to get windows to be able to read the RAID5 partition. I only want to make sure that windows won't automatically do something that will break the mdraid partition and lose the data.

I've looked around online, and seem to have found people mention some similar setups, but I just want to make sure. The data is almost 6TB, so backing it up right now is not really an option.

Answer 1

If you are installing Windows on the standalone drive and you are certain it is not actually part of the md RAID array, then I don't see how the installation would cause any problems.

The issue instead however will be that Windows will overwrite the MBR thus removing your Linux bootloader. If you'd like to use the Windows bootloader you can which under 7 I believe will detect Linux, otherwise you can follow Ubuntu's docs on how to save or re-write your MBR so you can continue using Grub.