Raid

[Penfold]

I have a new machine which has RAID hard disks.

I'm thinking that really I don't want nor need them. The machine is currently in RAID 0 with 2 x 320gb drives.

I understand that I can make them RAID 1 which means they'll mirror each other, but I'm thinking that why not just have two separate disks. It's seemed to have worked wekk for me previously, I have my operating system on one disk and work files etc on the other. Both are independently backed up to external hdd.

Can I remove the raid feature on SATA drives? Can I just run them as independent disks?

Thanks

PEN

[Gandalf]

yeah, you shouldn't have a problem with that. However, why not leave them striped for greater disk access speed and that way you'll get the space benefit of both disks.

Though you do stand a greater chance of loosing your data if a disk dies, so it makes backups a lot more important than before!

I've got two raptors striped and they fly

[Penfold]

Well now I've totally fubared them :ranting2:

I disable the raid and made them both standard physical disks.

Now I try to boot with a windows CD and it says there's a harware fault and that the setup is cancelled.

Oh for flips sake ..... :sad:

PEN

[T-Bag]

Yeah, messing with Raid never seems to end well. I personally have avoided it completely. I didn't like the idea of drivers to install windows, and the newfangled idea of making your hard drive either less stable or smaller. I'm sure there are ways of doing it which work well but I like my current system. Music, series, movies, Windows, important files/applications all on separate drives. And then back each of these up when I'm back home from uni by synching everything with my brothers.

Going from Raid to non-Raid is probably a format and start again job. My friend (a computer science student at my university) has Raid setup on his and when it goes wrong (suprisingly frequently) he often formats because it's alot of work/too hard to recover.
Have you tried Re-Raiding it up and seeing if it works so you can make a backup image of your windows (which can then be put on disk and used as a near painless method of switching from raid to non-raid)

(Norton Ghost 9.0 is good with a bootdisk loader than can check that an image is ok before using it)

[delanvital]

I am an avid RAID-user as well.

I have had two cases where one of the drives died. When that happened I connected the drives as individual drives. Booted on a 3rd drive. When in windows I used 3rd party software to run a virtual raid and restored most the data.

I will continue RAID'ing that's for sure

PEN - you disabled the RAID-functionality in the controller in the boot-up process? You can't go between RAID 1 and 0 and vice versa without reformatting, I think. Well, I guess you can with some imaging, but that could end up being complicated. My guess is that you need to reinstall windows.

[killcrazy]

t-bag is correct i think, if u simply set the raid back up in the bios it should boot to windows.the create an image for backup