Reformatting a HDD that was part of RAID 0 array

KiNETiK · 12 Apr 2012 at 20:08

Hey,

I have a couple of old drives that were previously configured in RAID 0. I have installed one of them in my desktop machine with the anticipation of formatting it and using it as a single disk in another computer I am building. However, in Windows Disk Management I can't seem to format the disk, I get the following errors:

and then after clicking ok I get:

Does anyone have any ideas?

Cheers

PS the individual disk is identified correctly in the Intel Rapid Storage program.

jellybeard999 · 12 Apr 2012 at 21:32

Try a boot disk formatter, such as DBAN http://www.dban.org/download or the manufacturers DOS tool.

KiNETiK · 12 Apr 2012 at 23:34

Cheers for that. Just running DBAN now, 3 hours later and hopefully I will have a freshly formatted hdd..

KiNETiK · 13 Apr 2012 at 10:02

Unfortunately it hasn't worked. I think it has something to do with DBAN requiring RAID drives to be disassembled into JBOD or single volumes before hand. The original computer I took these drives from is dead so I cannot just put them back in and disassemble the drives using the original RAID controller. So how do I change the drive back to being a single volume?

Cheers

Alex h · 13 Apr 2012 at 14:57

put both drives in another motherboard set bios to raid then exit and save then as loading windows go into raid setup and delete raid then youll be able to format each drive had to do it myself

Sin_Chase · 13 Apr 2012 at 15:33

Hmm.

Rather than format have you tried just deleting the actual partition, re-creating a suitable partition then formatting it?

Ideally you would delete and re-create the partition from a RAIDed disk anyway.

Worst case you could try chucking your current controller into raid and drop into the RAID BIOS on system bootup. While incompatible it might see the RAID data and at least allow you to nuke it.

Back in my server management days I could quite comfortably plug random SAS drives into a different HP controller, boot into SmartStart and have it recognise a load of jumbled/mangled RAID configurations. Just had to select and delete them from the disk then either re-add them into a new array or use them otherwise.