Disable RAID 1 without losing data Windows 10

[GAC0151]

I have Win10 Pro x64 on an AMD SB950 chipset, 2 drives mirrored. After I resized the drive array (deleted 2nd partition), I found one drive was offline due to a signature collision. OK, so there are was to reassign signatures, I got that. But what I don't get is the offline drive still shows the partitions that I thought would be gone as in the one drive that is currently online.

The RAID controller only allows deleting and warns all data will be lost. The BIOS only allows all SATA ports to be RAID when Raid is enabled.

As this is my first attempt with RAID, I am now convinced it is not suiting my needs, perhaps due to hardware and software limitations.

I want to know if and/or how I can disable RAID and use the operable drive as main boot drive without losing it altogether.

Any help would be a lifesaver
GAC

 

[hang-the-9]

You can't just turn off RAID, you need to backup your files, break the RAID setup and then install Windows again on the drive as a non-RAID one.

 

[iamacow]

If you OS isn't on the Raid-1 you can break it and boot to a single drive which I've done a few times. If the raid is setup as the OS, sometimes you can just disable raid-1 and boot up but it has not always worked. Software and Hardware Raid setups play a big role in this.

Raid-1 is just a mirror of a single drive. You can in theory just disable raid-1 and boot to a single drive which I've also done when the second drive has failed me.

However before you do anything I would back your files up. It is easy to erase everything.

 

[GAC0151]

If you OS isn't on the Raid-1 you can break it and boot to a single drive which I've done a few times. If the raid is setup as the OS, sometimes you can just disable raid-1 and boot up but it has not always worked. Software and Hardware Raid setups play a big role in this.

Raid-1 is just a mirror of a single drive. You can in theory just disable raid-1 and boot to a single drive which I've also done when the second drive has failed me.

However before you do anything I would back your files up. It is easy to erase everything.

 

[GAC0151]

My OS is on the RAID 1 so rather than re-installing from scratch to eliminate the RAID array, I decided to try to fix it. After backing up the entire drive, I physically disconnected the non-operable drive and rebooted without any issue other than a warning the RAID array was critical. Being hopeful at this point, I reconnected the other drive and proceeded to fix the disk signature collision following this excellent instruction on the subject. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2011/11/06/fixing-disk-signature-collisions/

From there I used AMD RAIDXpert to rebuild the array. It took about 1-1/2 hr but all is good again. Thanks for your input, otherwise I might have attempted something different and caused myself a greater loss than a couple of hours.