Re: How To Un-RAID

Star Fleet Admiral Q wrote:
Do you have a drive with 160GB of total space or 320GB or total space when looking at the Raid drive in Explorer?
If 160GB of total space, then you have Raid 1 (Mirroring) and your PC manufacturer should have instructions on their website or in your documentation on how to break a Raid 1 Mirror. You can then format the old mirror drive as you wish and store what you wish on the drive.
If you have 320GB of total space, you have Raid 0 (Stripping) and you can only fix break the stripping by breaking the Raid connection, then you'll need to reformat both drives and reinstall windows/apps clean. Reason is a file may be stored in many pieces across both drives. Backup any important data first, and make sure you have the non-raid drivers for your motherboard/I-O controller before you start.
Raid 0 gives you speed, Raid 1 gives you mirroring... there are other forms of Raid 5, 10 and 50, each builds redundancy and speed into the process, especially when using SCSI 15/20k rpm drives, although the 7200/10k available for SATA isn't bad for a desktop.


Tim, Andrew, and Admiral: This machine, which is a Sony VAIO, was originally configured as RAID 0, onboard RAID controller (Intel 82801FR) No WinXP CD came with it, instead it has a hidden partition for system restore. I am having issues with the following disk imaging software:

Norton Ghost 2003 - will create backup but under RAID 0 it cannot find some spanned images when restoring. Under RAID 1 it restores but with errors.

Norton Ghost 9 - will create backups but cannnot locate files when restore either in RAID 0 or 1.

Acronis True Image 8 - will create backup but "unable to load LINUX kernel" comes up when trying to restore (This is not a LINUX machine)

I was hoping to set it up as:
Disk 1 (160gb divided into 3 partition, C - OS, D - Data, E = Games)
Disk 2 (160gb no partition for Media.

I have reformatted it before as non-RAID but the other disk does not show up.

Hope this explains my situation well.  Thanx for the responses.

shaka
.

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