Deleting Raid?

[Creepingdeath1977]

I just ordered a dell refurb and it has 2 250gb sata's in raid 1, I would rather use the space instead of mirroring the drives so my question is can I delete the raid and vista show up on 1 drive and the other drive just show up normally or will I have to reinstall vista to get the results I want. I know nothing about raid but I guess you guys figured that out already.

 

[gigabyte1024]

If you remove the drive the array will be in a failed state.
you'd be better off deleting the array and reinstalling the OS.

After the BIOS and before the Windows boot screen there should be an option to start the RAID setup program. You can delete the array from here and then disable raid in the regular bios.

Do you homework before you try all this, it can be a bit hectic if you've never configured (or unconfigured) RAID before.

 

[axan]

Since in raid 1 the drives are mirror copies of each other in theory you should be able to remove 1 drive and either change the sata port in bios to non raid mode or hook it up to another non raided port and the os should still work fine. I never tried that but it should work.

 

[Maxtr0sity]

Since in raid 1 the drives are mirror copies of each other in theory you should be able to remove 1 drive and either change the sata port in bios to non raid mode or hook it up to another non raided port and the os should still work fine. I never tried that but it should work.

In theory that'd work, but it doesn't. You have to remove the RAID setup first before you unRAID in the BIOS. It's a little tricky, I screwed up the first time but fixed it with some harddrive utilities.