"Unraid" hard drive?

[Beetnik]

I have a redundant, broken pc which I can't boot and which has a couple of nice 250 GB Seagate ESATA hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration (software).

I've got a spare 3.5" HDD external caddy so would like to use one of the discs for archive purposes. When I attach the (now single) drive to my laptop the hardware is recognised asdrivers are installed automatically but then Windows (Vista Ultimate 64bit) can't see it - tried connecting with ESATA and USB 2 cables with same (non) result. Ditto on reboot.

I'm guessing this is normal but is there an easy way to solve the problem?

 

[IanT]

To me this sounds like you should use the laptop to satisfactorily format the drive and then it ought to work on your desktop PC. Do you have the drivers for the USB / ESATA interfaces for your 64 bit edition of Windows?

If you remember the bad old days, the equivalent of what you need to remove the RAID partition is FDISK. Actually, even though the old desktop with the two drives in doesn't boot any more, the RAID BIOS should give you the option of reverting the drives back to standard configuration, and that won't require any operating system to be running. You should then have an unformatted drive with no partitions. The Windows Disk Manager should then give the option to create new partitions as wanted.

Just in case I misread your post, does Windows fail to see the USB controller intarface, or the hard drive, or both?

Ian.

 

[Beetnik]

Sorted, thanks - looked in Disk Management and it was there.

'Initialise Disk' then format.