How to break a RAID mirror and run as two individual drives?

[Nick]

Hi all,

I'm running out of disk space.

Right now I have 2 x 250GB drives running in RAID 1 on a NVIDIA board with MediaShield running under WIndows.

I've made physical back ups of all the important stuff I want to never lose, so there's no point wasting 250GB of space...

But how do I break the array and get them running as two individual drives?

I've pulled the plug on one, the machine has still booted though it syas the array is degraded, I've then wiped the data off the second drive in the DOS RAID utility but the only options after that are to rebuild the array.

I booted up, opened up MediaShield and as soon as I highlighted the drive in an error state, the one I had unplugged and plugged back in, it decided to rebuild the damn mirrored array again.

There has to be some way to just tell it I want the drives as separate physical drives now, one drive as it is and the other nice and clean ready for more data, but how?

[Blitzen]

I used the Intel Matrix Storage Console to do mine

[arthurleung]

Try putting the drive on a seperate controller, fire it up and copy data from the (degraded) array to the now standalone drive?

[Stoo]

Ghost an image, then break the array, and restore to the single drive?

[peterb]

Think Stoos on the right track. Get the array working - so it is seen as a single drive. Image that 'drive' to a new drive, test it, then once it is working, reclaim the raided disks. That does mean getting a new disk though. If you are feeling brave, remove on of the disks, image the array (now degraded) to it, test it outside the array, and if it works, reclaim the other disk.

[baius]

I don't think this has been mentioned, but sorry if so: when you plug your drive "back in", do you plug it into the same port each time? Chances are you've tried using a different SATA (or IDE - you didn't say...) port already, but thought I'd suggest it just in case it makes a difference.

To explain: If you've got more than 2 SATA ports on your mobo, and you're currently using {1} and {2}, you could keep the original one in {1}, but put the one you're trying to break the RAID with in {3} or {4}. Does this work/help?