XP re-instal on from raid to single disk help

[pegasus1]

A mate whants to re-instal XP on his sytem and change his RAID (stripped) to two single disks, one for Windows and one for games.
Can he just removed one disk and re-boot with the windows disk and re-instal over the previous instal and thus save his previous settings.
Also if he does this will it keep the info (games and data) he has already.
Ive never used raid but ive a feeling he will have to re-format after backing up his data.
Any help and advice would be a bonus.

 

[Wyvern971]

If you have another hard drive the easiest waty would be to image tha array onto it, change the configuration to JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) and restore the image to it.

Acronis True Image should do the job

If you don't have a drive that will take the image try finding one which will burn to DVDs (not sure if Acronis does)

Otherwise it'll be a re-install

 

[Curiosityx]

Raid 0 or stripped as you refer to it as writes data across all avaliable drives, this is presented to the OS as a single logical volume which you can then partition, due to this the OS has no knowledge of where the data is on each disk, if you were to remove one of the drives you would fail the array and lose all you data.

As mentioned if you make a backup of the logical volume that Windows see's either onto a seperate single drive or another machine then re-install windows youll be fine.

I would recommend gathering some background knowledge on Raid beforehand though and also how to specifiy additional controller types during the Windows installtion.

 

[pegasus1]

Cheers guys, ultimately he want to end up with 2 x HDD with no raid, one drive for Windows and Apps and one drive for games/music etc.
Ive told him to save his game data to a DVD (saves/patches etc) and then download the latest drivers for his mobo/gfx/soundcard then to do a complete re-instal of XP and once thats up and running connect the second drive and load the games and patches.