Cannot format ex raid hard drive

[Gandhik]

I have got a desktop system , I use two operating system on it , of which one of them is a Windows xp and the other one is Windows 7 operating system , I have got two SATA ex-raid hard disk disks installed in my system . It seems that its is not being recognized and I want to format those hard drives, but I tried to do it , but was not successful in doing so, if you have any idea how these hard drives are being formatted then please let me know , I will be very thankful .

[Candace]

I think it seems very much old , you have not mentioned that whether the are recognized or not , You even did not mention whether it gets registers with the motherboard or not, I think that can be the only issue . But if the hard drive is being recognized then , if you really wish to format it then please recreate it and then try to format it again . By recreating I mean to recreate the Raid . Try the partition method , if it does not work.

[Sabastiaan]

Before formatting you need to make clear a few points that about the SATA controllers:

• You are suppose to use only one SATA controller at a time.
• You are suppose to use one HDD on the SATA controller, and both of as two separate hard disks.
• You are not to suppose boot from the SATA 2 controller.
• You are allowed to create a Raid0 or Raid 1 array with a disk on each controller but if you use the same drive , then it will be better.

[teenQ]

You can set up a raid array using the following steps:

• Boot your system and enter the F4 key to enter the Raid Configuration BIOS.
• You will be able to locate your both hard drives shown closer to the center
• Select create RAID set, you can choose either of the Striped also called as Raid0 option or Mirrored option also called as Raid1
• The default setting for a normal array is 16k, do not do any thing if it is already set as 5. After that you will have to choose either r the Raid 0 or the Raid 1 , press Y on the highlighted option 6. You can exit from there.