I have a couple of spanned volumes on a current XP install, when I install W7 on the 6th (waiting with bated breath) will it detect these volumes automatically or am I going to have to delete them and start from scratch/

Please see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927520Carey Frisch

Many thanks for your reply, all of that info is aimed at Vista, and apparently for the boot disk. I have a number of spanned volumes that are used for storage only, when I install Windows 7 on the separate boot disk (SSD nice!) do you know or can you direct me to info as to whether I can use these volumes without too much hassle?

Bit the bullet and installed Windows 7 ultimate last night. Installation went very smoothly and quickly, everything picked up except my spanned volumes. Upon further investigation the Sil 3114 RAID controller to which the spanned disks are connected wasn't being picked up. Quick scurry over to the manufacturer's website did help but the card could not start code 10. Bah! Whilst I was thinking about my next move I ran windows update, and then ran it again when it told me there were further updates following a reboot, one of the optional updates was an updated driver for the Sil 3114 chipset...SCORE! Installed this driver, reboot, W7 picks up the RAID controller and the spanned volumes and mounts them. Nice!