How do you UnRAID a drive?

[Martin Welch]

Three months ago I purchased a single Samsung SpinPoint P120 SATA II
drive and connected it to my then MSI KT4 Ultra board. However, I could
only connect the drive to the ultra board's Promise RAID controller.

I've now built a new box with an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe (my old box just
wouldn't run Quake IV fast enough). I've been able to connect the drive
as a standard (non-RAID) drive and I can now access the drive from Windows.

However, the setup has been unreliable. When I write to the drive the
drive gets corrupted, forcing me to run chkdsk. Usually, the files I've
just written are trashed.

I've tried reformatting the drive but the disk manager thinks the drive
is exactly half (125Gb) the actual capacity (250Gb) of the drive.

So I think I need to remove the RAID information to turn the drive back
into a 'normal' drive.

I'm new to this SATA and RAID stuff so I'd appreciate any help.

Martin

 

[old man]

If the disk management only sees 125gb then it would appear you dont have
bigLba enabled in win*
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013&Product=winxp
or
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098

 

[DaveW]

You merely need to turn RAID off in the BIOS and then reformat both of your
harddrives and do a fresh install of the OS and your software onto the drive
you select.

 

[abc]

Three months ago I purchased a single Samsung SpinPoint P120 SATA II drive
and connected it to my then MSI KT4 Ultra board. However, I could only
connect the drive to the ultra board's Promise RAID controller.

I've now built a new box with an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe (my old box just
wouldn't run Quake IV fast enough). I've been able to connect the drive as
a standard (non-RAID) drive and I can now access the drive from Windows.

However, the setup has been unreliable. When I write to the drive the
drive gets corrupted, forcing me to run chkdsk. Usually, the files I've
just written are trashed.

I've tried reformatting the drive but the disk manager thinks the drive is
exactly half (125Gb) the actual capacity (250Gb) of the drive.

So I think I need to remove the RAID information to turn the drive back
into a 'normal' drive.

I'm new to this SATA and RAID stuff so I'd appreciate any help.

Martin

Please clarify.
Do you only have one HDD attatched to the RAID controller?

It seems that way. If this is the case you do not have a RAID setup, RAID
requires at least 2 disks.
You are just using the SATA connectors that are capable of implementing
RAID. (usually RAID 0,1 only).

Someone else has pointed out your real problem, otherwise just move the
drive to another SATA controller, the same as you would an IDE drive.

 

[Martin Welch]

Thanks for the links - this was the problem.

If the disk management only sees 125gb then it would appear you dont have
bigLba enabled in win*
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013&Product=winxp
or
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098