4x500GB Hard Drives but only 1 Drive showing in Disk Manager

[biocentrism]

I am hoping someone can clarify this mystery for.

I am trying to setup a used computer. It has 4 500GB hard drives inside. But when I go to Disk Management, it only shows 1 Hard Drive (C: drive) that has 1.4 GB capacity.

The computer I think set up with Raid5, but I do not know how to check this to verify.

Can anyone explain what is going on? How can there be just 1 drive in Disk Management when there are 4 physical drives? And if 4x500GB=2TB, why does it only show 1.4GB in Disk Manager?

How do I access each drive to wipe it? It is as if some of the drives are hidden?

Thank you.

 

[popatim]

The raid controller grabs the drives and presents the raid array(s) to the OS instead of the the individual drives. If you enter the bios you wouldn't see the drives there either. You must enter the Raid bios or the windows raid utility to see the individual drives & array info.

to enter the raid bios look for the message shortly after post & before windows loads. Such as "Press Ctrl+i to enter the raid bios"

 

[biocentrism]

Thank you for the information popatim. When I enter the raid bios, is it easy to disable the Raid? I basically want it operating as 4 separate drives C:, D:, E:, F:. Is there risk that I screw things up. The operating system has been reinstalled onto what is now called C: drive. If I disable Raid will the operating system still be on C: and D: E: F: will be empty? Thanks again!

 

[anti-duck]

It sounds like you do have a RAID 5 array, RAID 5 takes a little bit of space (~25%) from each physical HDD and uses it for parity, also 4x500GB HDD's won't necessarily mean 2TB of storage, the actual space on each drive won't be 500GB so you ending up with 1.4TB (I hope you didn't really mean that you have ended up with just 1.4 gigabytes anyway lol!?) with a RAID 5 array of 4 500GB HDD's sounds correct.

When you start your computer, there should be an option to press a key (when you get the prompt to press a key to go into BIOS) to go into RAID config and you can verify that you do have a RAID array configured in there.

 

[anti-duck]

Disabling the RAID is as simple as going into the config and turning the RAID level off and then it'll prompt you to format all of your drives and then once you do re-install Windows, you'll have to initialise 3 of the drives in disk management

 

[biocentrism]

Ok I will give that a try. Thanks for the info!

 

[biocentrism]

Ok turns out it was not so easy. I think I have royally screwed things up. Here is what I did:

1. I went Crtl-R to the RAID config and disabled the virtual disks. Systems read 4 Physical Disks present. So far so good.

2. The I went to BIOS to move from RAID to ATA and put the 4 drives on AUTO. Still so far so goo.d

3. But when I went to boot up, it said the drives were not detected.

4. I then did some other things which had the end result of the drives not being detectable at all.

5. When I tried to reinstall the OS, the computer is asking for drivers!!! Not sure which drivers it wants but I assume it is the hard drive drivers???

6. Come to find out on the computer (Dell T310) I have something called a PERC6i controller which I read on the internet that it can only be RAID and cannot be non-RAID.

7. So I go back and try to set up RAID, but the computer is still asking for drivers.

Can anyone help me figure this out. I would be happy just to go back to a RAID config just so that I can use this computer.

Thanks much!

 

[rgd1101]

continue on
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2326599/recover-hard-drive-setup-fubar.html