Removing RAID 0 for single drive

[JoshT]

Hey, don't normally need to ask questions, but I'm a noob when it comes to RAID. I currently have a pair of WD 500GB SATA II hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration as a boot drive, along with a 1T Hitachi on it's own. Not as impressed by the RAID performance as I was told I would be, and now I've got another use for one of those drives. I want to convert from the RAID 0 to just using a single 500 GB for a boot drive, with the 1T as my back-up and file storage drive. The only way I know how to convert is by doing a fresh install of Windows.

Is there another way to do it? I'm guessing that I can't just clone the RAID 0 to my 1T drive then back to one of the 500GB drives and expect it to work properly.

I'll probably just end up doing the fresh install anyway, but I'm willing to look at any recommendations.

EDIT: I have Windows 7 Ultimate if that matters.

 

[alexpmcmurphy]

im assuming that its a hardware raid since your using it for boot, you could try making a disk image using something like ghost or a live linux distro that does the same thing onto your TB, then formatting the 500gb drives and restoring the image to one of them, that leaves your TB and 1 500gb free

 

[AllanD]

I had a RAID setup on my HP d5000t quad core desktop at one point

But the MoBo I have considers a simple RAID setup to be the default operating
mode as a matter of hardware.

I had to fight to get it to run in single drive system mode.

What you can try to do is clone them to a single external drive
as a "spanned drive" like a RAID-0 array is essentially a "single drive"

I'm not sure how a cloning program like Clonezilla will see a
spanned RAID-0 volume.

You can try downloading clonezilla, it if free and automatically triggers
your disc burning software...

http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php

Clonezilla boots from the CD, but I don't know how it "sees" a RAID array.

AD

 

[JoshT]

Thanks for the replies. Decided it would be less headache to just back-up my files and do a fresh install. There wasn't anything on it that I can't reinstall easily.