Remains of RAID array on single Raptor disk? Help?

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RanceJustice

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I could use a little help with reconfiguring my system. At one point in time I had a nice RAID0 setup with 2 74GB raptors connected through a PCI RAID card. Unfortunately, the machine that housed it went belly up, so for quite some time they were unused. Flash forward to today.

Having built my new SFF, it turns out I only have room to comfortably fit 2 drives in my drive cage. I decided on using one of the 74gb raptors and the other a 160gb Seagate 7200.7. I connected them both to the SATA 3 and 4 ports on my mobo, figuring they would be locked and therefore no problem with my current overclock. Both drives still had "stuff" on them from their previous uses, but I figured I'd just delete the partitions during windows install as per usual. Herein lies the problem.

When I get to the windows partitioning tool, I delete the 3 partions I had on my 160gb seagate, giving me 150gb+ unpartioned space. However, the Raptor's table is unusual. It tells me there is a 40gb partition on it, but then another 90/100 gb of unpartitioned space! So I delete the only partition on it and now I have 2 seperate "unpartitioned space" labels. So its set up like so..

74gb drive on Blah Blah Blah atapi [MBR]

Unpartitioned space - 40gb (I'm approximating, its really 39998mb etc.)
Unpartitioned Space - 100gb

I've never seen this before. All I can think of is this has something to do with the raid array, as the previous RAID was approximately 148gb. Why after disconnecting it would this problem persist? Is there a way I can get it to forget about the rest of the space and just go back to giving me 74gb?
 
if you can boot into a linux live CD you might can wipe out the MBR. Or find a tool that'll zero out the drive.
 
that would certainly be an option. If you find that easiest to use, then you should go ahead. In the end, you don't care about that data on the disk, do you?
 
That's correct, there is nothing of importance on either drive. I'm actually running Boot and Nuke right now. I'm running the standard "fill drive with one pass of 0's" E-Z wipe, instead of one of the DoD versions. Hopefully that will get the pesky leftover data.

Fun fact - this drive erase program is completely free and runs on a stripped down Linux kernal. Open source for the win!
 
Another thing you could try is to boot from the XP cd and go into the recovery console and try erasing the parition table from there. I don't remember if that's an option or not. You'd have to look at the available commands to see.

Also if you have a Win9x bootdisk you could boot from it and run FDISK and delete all partitions from there.

EDIT: nevermind you squeezed an update in while I was typing that.
 
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