Breaking RAID 1

[Nelviticus]

I'm going to rebuild my PC shortly in preparation for Windows 7. That will involve taking my existing RAID 1 array - which uses my motherboard's Intel ICH9R 'fake raid' controller - and using the two 500GB drives in a few other configurations to find out which is fastest.

The thing that worries me is that somewhere on those two drives there's a Windows 7/Windows XP boot loader which (as far as I'm aware) lives in the boot sector and so won't get overwritten by formatting the disks.

Has anyone ever broken up a RAID array that has a Vista or Win7 boot loader before and used the disks for something else? Is there anything I need to do in preparation or will it just work?

Nelviticus

 

[kjv1611]

Breaking a RAID 1 array really shouldn't matter any different than taking care of a single hard drive.

Also, if you use something like Darik's boot and nuke

http://www.dban.org

to format the drive, then NOTHING will be left on the drive - not boot sectors, NOTHING. [sunglasses]

There are some other free disk wipe/format utilities which will also remove all partiitons, sectors, but I can't remember the names off hand.

Here's one of them - I thought it wasn't free, but it has a free and paid version:

http://www.killdisk.com/

And here is a list of various free apps, the data wiping apps are listed in the linked-to section:

http://www.freebyte.com/filediskutils/#dataremoval

The only problem I'm finding with DBAN as of late is that it seems to have trouble with some SATA drives - getting access to them. I suppose it doesn't have as good of driver support as some apps.

KillDisk is nice in that it can be run from within Windows. So, you can take your HDDs and connect to a different system running Windows, and use that system to wipe your disks clean.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[ArizonaGeek]

I like Kill Disk, the free version is a one pass only version, the paid version will allow many options. In this case the free version would work just fine.

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!

 

[Nelviticus]

Thanks for the responses, I don't have a spare PC to format the drives in and I won't be able to format them from within my current Windows installation as you can't format your system disk, so I think I will use DBAN since that's bootable and my motherboard is a few years old and pretty common.

Cheers!

Nelviticus

 

[kjv1611]

The good thing is that DBAN only costs a blank CD or floppy (or you can even boot from a USB drive if your system will boot from USB), and if it won't work with your SATA drivers, as it is, then you'll know really quickly.

1. boot from DBAN CD
2. type [blue]autonuke[/blue]
3. hit <enter> on your keyboard
4. If you get a black screen saying DBAN finished! within just a couple minutes or even few seconds, then it didn't find the hard drives... move on to the next test.

You can also get the UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) which I'm sure has at least 1 format utility on it.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[BadBigBen]

Nelveticus, since you will be installing 7even, you should not need to worry about the left over boot loader at all!!!

now if you would install XP, then it would be a good idea to NUKE the drive...

just my 2cents worth...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[Nelviticus]

I'll be installing 7 and XP (possibly Ubuntu as well if I don't use RAID).

Nelviticus