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

[camosilver311]

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. 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 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, 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.

 

[turtile]

If your computer can't read the date from the drives, they were probably set up as RAID 0 or the drives are not any good. Do the drives show up in the BIOS?

 

[camosilver311]

If your computer can't read the date from the drives, they were probably set up as RAID 0 or the drives are not any good. Do the drives show up in the BIOS?

the drives are fine, they are nearly brand new. it's the case they are in that is the problem. i've never checked bios. where in bios does it say if they are raid 0 or not? i am going to unplug my other internal HDDs (not the one with my OS on it) and boot the comp with the 1TB drives, just need to know how to remove the raid setup

 

[camosilver311]

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?

 

[1computeroutlet]

Just break the raid, change in the bios to ide. are you trying to save data?