Dual booting W11 RAID 0 and LinuxMint mdadm RAID 0 problem getting W11 to work unless Linux drives unplugged?

[mickg]

Hi there,
I have an interesting problem with trying to dual boot Windows 11 and Linuxmint.
Would really appreciate any ideas about how to do this slightly mad experiment I have going on here:

It is an old motherboard: ASUS Sabretooth 990FX Rev.2, so the options are SATA 1-4 set to RAID and 5 & 6 can then only be either RAID too or IDE. I set them up IDE and installed Linuxmint there using mdadm.
BIOS is set to UEFI only.

I have a Windows 11 RAID 0 set up on two SATA SSDs SATA 1 & 2 and a Linuxmint mdadm RAID 0 set up on two other SSDs set to IDE, SATA 5 & 6.
I also have an old W7 disk on SATA 3 but it is not EFI and its just there to pull files off and boot up if I really feel like changing to Legacy mode (The DVD player is on SATA 4).
I am using a rEFInd live USB to try to boot this madness.

So, booting up the rEFInd Live USB, if I click on the LinuxMint (Ubuntu logo) in rEFInd it boots up the linux array.
However-if I select the Windows logo it hangs at a black screen. If I then pull out the SATA cables for the two Linux SSDs the system immediately boots up the Windows 11 array with no difficulty.
So I have to keep unplugging SATA 5 & 6 to get W11 to work.

Why would the presence of the two disks of the LM array prevent the Windows 11 RAID from booting?

Obviously, this is not the machine I rely on for work (that is a Mac also dual booting Linux Mint) I am doing this because I really don't have much going on in my life.
It would be lovely to be able to make this thing just work, without having to unplug stuff.
Any ideas as to what might be happening here would be very much appreciated.

Thank you!

Mick

 

[mickg]

Hi Mick,
Yes, here I am replying to myself, anyone else joining in will be so welcome


These are the partitions of /dev/sdc:

Device          Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sdc1        2048     616447     614400  300M EFI System
/dev/sdc2      616448     649215      32768   16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sdc3      649216 3904931839 3904282624  1.8T Microsoft basic data
/dev/sdc4  3904931840 3907028991    2097152    1G Windows recovery environment

Other disk is /dev/sdd

This is seen by Linux as:
/dev/mapper/pdc_cbidabeef

Not yet managed to mount it properly. Wondering if I can do something in SystemD so learning more about that this week.

Mick