Lorne said:
Hi all,
i just got a new computer and it seems that it has been setup as a
RAID 0 (2 hard drives 160GB each) but it only appears as one hard
drive 320 GB in size.
Yes, that's what Raid 0 does. It treats the two drives as one, but
interleaves access between the two to make it faster.
how can i make if back to 2 hard drives?
Assuming you stay with RAID 0, for all practical purposes you can think of
it as one 320GB drive. There's no way to make it two.
However you can create two or more partitions on that 320GB drive, and make
two 160s, a 220 and a 100 or any combination you want, just as you could if
you hade one *physical* hard drive.
do i have to format it?
will both drives show up after formatting?
Unfortunately, no version of Windows provides any way of changing the
existing partition structure of the drive nondestructively. The only way to
do what you want is with third-party software. Partition Magic is the
best-known such program, but there are freeware/shareware alternatives. One
such program is BootIt Next Generation. It's shareware, but comes with a
free 30-day trial, so you should be able to do what you want within that 30
days. I haven't used it myself (because I've never needed to use *any* such
program), but it comes highly recommended by several other MVPs here.
Whatever software you use, make sure you have a good backup before
beginning. Although there's no reason to expect a problem, things *can* go
wrong.
