Xpert help. How to set drive to NON-RAID in other PC?

[leandrodafontoura]

Hey all, I was using 2x HDD in RAID 0, but I replaced them for SSDs recently. My motherboard id P5QL-E, P43 chip intel. "Configure sata as" was set to "RAID".

Ok, so I ship one of my HDD to a friend in the other side of the world and hes not able to get the HDD working with his Windows 7 rig. (I did not reformated the drive as Im keeping the other "half" of my data anyways), so the drive is on a "RAID status" He says BIOS does not sees the drive.

I went to check this, and I plugued the other HDD, in my possession, to my computer. My BIOS did not see the drive. Having said that, during initial POST, the Intel Matrix Technology did notice the drive. It noticed my SSDs AND the HDD. In adition, it noticed the RAID 0 array, including its name given by me, and the FAIL status next to it (as the other drive was missing). After entering the utility by pressing ctrl+i, I was able to reset the HDD to "Non-RAID" and then BIOS was able to see the drive. Now the questions:

My friend may not have an intel motherboard. Regarding his drive:

1)Does windows 7 sees the HDD under disk managment? (a RAID HDD) and is it possible to reset to non-raid under windows?
2)Is there a program that will see the "raid hdd" and reset to non-raid so that windows can see it?
3)Assuming my friend has an intel mobo, will the Matrix Storage tech automatically see the drive like it happened to me?
4)If its AMD, what can be done?

 

[chesteracorgi]

Your HDDs were not seen because they are "incomplete," under Win7. The problem is that RAID 0 writes to the HDDs in stripes and puts this byte on drive 0 and the next byte on drive 1, alternating between the two.

The easiest solution for you both is for him to return the drive to you and for you to de-RAID them yourself and then re-ship the second drive. Of course you should back up the RAIDed data before you do this.

If that is impractical you may need to use some third party disk untility to format the drives. I use partition wizard, but there are a bunch of free and paid utilities out there.

FYI: Your old data is not accessible unless you get the old drive from your friend and back it up.

 

[foscooter]

The BIOS sees the drive as part of a RAID array, so I don't think any disk formatting tools will work.

Upon boot up, try setting the drive to Non-RAID (remove it from the array), and see if that works.

Your friend may be up a creek without a paddle. He may or may not be able to do the same, as the RAID array was set up on your rig, he may not be able to un-RAID it.

However, you may try DISKPART, a DOS based utility in Windows since XP (replacing FDISK). Google it, to learn it's commands (i.e. try clean all).

Cheers.