Win 7 on previous RAID install

Hi, I have my system configured for a raid 6 with 4 drives and have a separate drive which is not part of the raid for the OS which is win 7 rc version. So now my question is, I just purchased the new retail version of 7 and would like to do a clean install, So what will happen to the data on my raid will it stay recognized as I’m installing the OS on a different drive or will it get scraped out. Please advice I can’t backup data on the raid drives as I don’t have additional HD for that. Thank you.

Clean install as normal. Your data will be perfectly safe.

When going to do the clean install, you want to have your RAID controller driver ready on a floppy, usb stick, dvd, cd or anything that is not connected to the RAID controller you're running.

If you're installing to a completely new drive not attached to the RAID, no driver will be necessary upon installing Windows. You can then install the driver in the device manager at desktop or use the installer .exe if it has one.

If you install to the same drive/partition with Windows currently on it, the installer will place all of your existing files in Windows.old folder at root.

You can then go in it once at desktop and copy/paste user account folders (or parts of)....things like that....or perhaps better, set everything up again manually because you'll have a clean install and anything not working right will not carry over to the new install.

Like for instance, you can copy just the Mozilla settings folder over to the new install. Or just the Winamp one..etc...at your choice.

Shouldn't be a problem provided you pick the correct drive to install on
BTW, you could use Acronis True Image to backup your raid array to DVDs.