Unbelievable hard drive behavior

I had two 500G drives in raid-0.

I then took apart the raid, formatted the two drives, installed into the machine on a DIFFERENT sata controller, everything works well.

I use it a few days.

Then I just boot the machine once more and...can't see my 500g drives AT ALL. They have simply vanished.

I check the disk management..:WHAT? it shows ONE 1t drive there, RAW filesystem.

I shutdown and take out one drive, reboot and STILL it shows just one terabyte drive there. One, two drives, any SATA port, it always shows as one terabyte drive.

I rip both drives out, put in USB case and stick in my laptop...shows as one 500g drive, RAW filesystem, nothing on disk.

Very nice. Incredible.

So now I've destroyed the partitions, formatted the drives...put them in the w7 machine...and now I just wait how long will it take for win 7 to decide they are actually a single terabyte drive again...

And no, my sata controller (intel on Asus P5Q) is not set to raid mode either.

If I have to reinstall w7 for the third time to get it to work without amazing trickery, I'll be very pissed indeed.

Thats weird. Could you post a screenshot of diskmgmt?

Damn, I should have thought of that. Now it's too late as I swapped the drives around.

See, the way it unfolds from here is I completely erased and removed all partitions, re-partitioned the drives, formatted to 500g ntfs and they work fine in my laptop via either eSata or USB...and installed back to win7...guess what?

Just plug in either of the 500g drives and it is shown in disk management as 1tb drive (900 something) and as RAW.

For some reason win7 remembers - or maybe rather finds info from the HD's - that they've been a part of RAID 0 and treats them as such. I can't fathom that...different controller and all.

Anyhow, as I write this, I installed my 1tb backup drive to the win7 machine and it works fine; put the 500g drives each in USB enclosures and in those they are recognized correctly.

So..I used to have 2 internal 500g drives and a backup drive of 1T for those; now it's vice versa and I have the 1t drive as internal and the 500g's in USB/esata boxes. Well it works that way too.

I'm pretty sure the blame goes to the Marvell drivers I posted elsewhere earlier. Just didn't work right.

Glad to hear that you got it sorted. :)

Yeah, thanks...

Still, it's very funny...even now that the 500G drive works fine in its USB box as external drive...if I connect it with eSata to my laptop, yeah, it's 500G and all the data is there...if I connect with eSata to my win7 machine, it shows as 1tb RAW file format drive...

I wonder if there is something in the drive format that reports to w7 it used to be a part of raid, or if my w7 installation somehow 'remembers' the drive serial or something and thinks it's a part of a RAID set...I guess I'll see when I re-install w7 some day.

Also, it kind of sucks I can't use eSata for my backup drives on w7 now..I should probably sell those 500g drives and get one new 1t drive instead.