How to remove RAID drives in XP and use them as separate drives again?

M

MetalMan

New Member
I have 2 1TB HDDs that are set up in a "galaxy metal gear box", I think it's a RAID set up. The case they are in is almost never recognized by windows and therefore I can't even use the drives. Sometimes (but RARELY) windows will recognize the drives, but 99/100 times I turn on the box they aren't seen at all. The drives are fine, they are nearly brand new. It's the case they are in that is the problem. They were meant to be used as a backup for everything on my computer, but since I can't ever get windows to recognize the damn drives I am scrapping the setup and replacing my 250 and 500 GB internal drives with these 2 1TB drives (going to use these drives internally) and buying a separate 3TB external for my backups. However, I need to know how to remove the RAID setup so that I can reuse these drives again. I don't care about the data on these 1TB drives, I can erase them completely. I just need to know what to do to remove the RAID setup and use the drives internally.

I tried to search google for an answer, but I don't know if my setup is RAID 0 or 1. I don't know the difference either, and I don't know how to check. I can't check the drives when they are used in the metal gear box because my computer doesn't recognize them. I could unplug on of my other internal HDDS and plug in the 1TB drives, but I don't know what the consequences of doing so would be so I figured I'd just wait for an answer here.
 
If.you don't care about the data on them then just killdisk or Shan.the drives and use them as you wish. Take them.out of the case and hook up separately to computer.
 
johnb35 said:
If.you don't care about the data on them then just killdisk or Shan.the drives and use them as you wish. Take them.out of the case and hook up separately to computer.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. Now that I'm thinking about it, there may be some thins on those drives that I'd like to back up. Not sure though without being able to access the drives and see what's on there, I know MOST of it is stuff already on my PC that I can just backup with the new external HDD but there may be a few things that aren't on the PC. How would I go about accessing the data on these drives now? Can I just plug them in in place of 2 of my internal drives and will the RAID setup work like this, internally instead of externally in the metal gear box case? If not, what do I need to do in order to be able to access the data on these drives?
 
If it was raid 0, then you will only be able to copy data off if its put back in raid operation. If it was raid 1, then you can access the drive without doing anything.
 
johnb35 said:
If it was raid 0, then you will only be able to copy data off if its put back in raid operation. If it was raid 1, then you can access the drive without doing anything.
Click to expand...

I plugged in one drive and it found that, but I ended up reformatting it to get it to work, no big deal I guess about the data on it. The other drive give me this error when I try to boot the computer:

3rd master hard disk s.m.a.r.t. command failed. press f1 to continue

After pressing F1, the computer took much longer than normal to boot windows. The drive shows up in device manager, but not in disk management.

What can I do to get this drive to show up in disk management so that I can reformat it?
 
Damn... these drives have VERY little usage too, since they were only on while backing up data. That sucks, probably due to all the power "dips" we had while I was living in Florida. Killed my last computer. Glad to be out of that state.
 
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