[estisser]

So here's my situation:

I had a home-built PC with an 80GB system drive running Vista 32bit and a separate RAID 0 array composed of 2 320GB Seagate drives. I had an error on one of the drives in the RAID array, and broke down the array.

I can still boot the system into windows from the main boot drive. I also have no desire to rebuild the RAID array, I just want to keep using the drives. I've run disk check software from Seagate on both drives and have found no error, so I think it was simply a timing error between the disks.

In any case. my question is: can and should I reformat both of the former RAID drives from within Windows Vista so I can continue using them as storage drives?

Thanks for any help!:wave:

 

[raptor_pa]

It should be, but just to verify the boot loader is on teh right drive, disconnect both the raid drives, and boot the PC. If windows starts normally, the the boot loader is where it should be and you can format away.

 

[estisser]

Thanks raptor!

I was able to boot into Windows twice yesterday, so I know the boot sector is fine.

I ran into problems trying to use Disk Management to reformat though. The two previous RAID drives both showed up but were listed "unkown". When the program tried to scan them, the computer seemed to lock up; mouse movements took 2-3 minutes to show up and the computer appeared to be "thinking" constantly. After about two hours, I did a force-restart, convinced that nothing was happening.

Not sure where to go from here. The drives don't show up under "My Computer" but they are recognized by the BIOS, Device Manager, and by Disk Management (though that doesn't seem to help much).

Any suggestions would be most appreciated. I haven't found a thing via Google on how to resolve this....:sigh:

 

[raptor_pa]

If they are a hardware raid, make sureyou turn off raid mode, or they will be reported as a single logical volume. Windows doesn't really check hardware, iot takes the word of whatever manages the hardware, in this case a hardware RAID controller will report one volume, or if the raid has failed my report the disk is not there even tho BIOS recognizes two independent disks. If connected to MoBo BIOS reads the physical disks first, and prepares to hand that off, the raid controller takes that info from BIOS, and modifies it to the raid configuration, this then is what gets passed to the OS, which says OK I'll take your word for it and reports the single volume, Windows reads and writes the disk as if it were a single volume, the raid controller is responsible for writing the data to the right disk.

 

[estisser]

Yep, already turned off RAID on the individual disks as well as disabling RAID fully on motherboard via BIOS.

Still, Disk Management never managed to do anything with the disks :upset:

Would it accomplish anything to uninstall the drives via device manager within Windows and then somehow force Windows to re-recognize them?

I'm really still not sure where to go on this...

Thanks again for all your help, and in advance for any further help.ray:

 

[raptor_pa]

See if the RAID is still recognized in Device manager, and uninstall the raid, might be seeing the driver still...

 

[estisser]

Device Manager shows only my main boot drive and the two separate Seagate drives that used to be in the RAID array.

I've been trying to use Seagate DiscWizard tonight to redo the drives. Since I'm still not sure whether there was an error on one of the disks (I'm getting mixed messages with the Seagate tools software to test the drives) I decided to add one drive at a time.

So far though, I haven't had success even with the drive I thought was OK.

I'm booted into Windows from the main disk, but the Seagate program doesn't seem to be able to write to the drive.

DiscWizard also indicates the drive's interface as "RAID" but I have no idea what that would mean.

Any ideas??