Turning off RAID

[john.roswen]

I got an old Nobilis that used to be a server. It has two 80gb hard drives that are set to RAID 1.

I want to do a clean install of windows XP, but when I booted from the CD and tried to install, it told me there was no drive to install to. I looked through the microsoft website and this is caused by the RAID setup.

From what I can tell the raid controller is an Adaptec. I can boot into the RAID settings at start up by holding down the keys it asks for, but it doens't give me the option to delete the array. The options delete, rebuild, etc are grayed out while the only option that isn't is "Create new array". I don't want a new array, but selecting that option tells me no drives are available anyway.

How can I just get rid of the RAID? I don't need any information on the drives.

 

[Hefemeister]

The problem you are having with installing xp is the lack of a 3rd party driver for the adaptec card.

What card do you have?

If I remember my adaptec raid bios correctly you need to select the existing raid array before you can delete the array.

 

[john.roswen]

I managed to remove the array and format both of the hard drives in the raid utility. To what is formatted it I am not sure, but I'm guessing thats not the problem.

Windows still doesn't recognize the hard drive even though the array is gone and the drives are wiped.

 

[Hefemeister]

The problem you are having with installing xp is the lack of a 3rd party driver for the adaptec card.

What card do you have?

^^^^^^^^^^^

 

[john.roswen]

Sorry for the delay. In the about section of the Adapted setup utility, it lists

Adapted RAID Setup Utility v1.12/791
11/22/2002

 

[Hefemeister]

I want to know what actual card you have ie. Adaptec 2257700-R

If you do not know you can open the case and look at the card. It will generally have the information posted on the card itself.

We need this info to get the raid driver disk to use when installing xp via the f6 option.
See if the driver disk you have has a exe file that will create a driver floppy to use in the xp install. If not we need to download it.

Windows xp does not have native sata / raid support so without drivers at install time it will not recognize the drives.

Once you get the model you can find the driver here.
Adaptec - Adaptec - Support