Are HDDs That Were Used In RAID 1 'Marked?'

I can't figure out which terms to search to answer this question. I apologize if it has been answered before.

I have three sets of 'matching pairs' of disk drives in hand. Two sets were used in RAID 1 arrays in a previous XP/Pro based system. The RAID was established using Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) software.

I want to reuse the drives in my recently installed Windows 7/Pro x64 system. I have not intentionally installed IRST on this system. Note that my motherboard, Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3P (rev. 2.1), was designed with RAID in mind.

The WD Raptors were OS/Program drives. If they don't prove too small at 74 Gb, I want to use them in an eSATA box for backup storage of data. I plan to completely reformat them as a single NTFS partition. Can I safely conclude that any memory that they were once in a RAID configuration will be removed by this process?

Is it true that the 477 Gb and 610 Gb WD Caviar drives may give me trouble if they, too, are not completely reformatted? Are they 'marked' as RAID drives? Will this cause problems in the future if I use only one of the pair to store data files and reformat the other to store backup images? Can they be 'unmarked' or do I need to move all the data to a temporary storage device so that I can reformat them?

I am using one of the third set, a pair of Crucial M550 SSDs, for my Windows 7 OS and program files. I'd like to use the other as a backup drive on which to store images of C:\ Unfortunately it has a botched attempt at installing Windows 7 on it and refuses to respond to 'diskpart' at a command prompt. In another thread I was told to try PartedMagic and I've emailed Patrick Verner in the hope that he will tell me how to get the program onto a bootable CD/DVD.

Recover a Solid State Drive For Use After a Failed Win7 Install Attemp

Thanks,

baumgrenze

linnemeyerhere said:

To the best of my knowledge formatting this drives should wipe them enough to reconfigure your new Raid. Lets hope someone with deep Raid knowledge will confirm as well.

Thank you, linnemeyerhere

Just to be clear, if I can undo the RAID 1 on the Data Disk pair without reformatting, I'd really like to do that. I'll reformat one of them later, perhaps the smaller of the two.

That said, I've seen some flaky behavior in the last few days.

I was warned that CHKDSK needed to run on F:\. I was in a rush and I ignored the warning as it was bedtime. When I later restarted the system, CHKDSK ran on D:\, not of F:\.

I was evaluating Apache Open Office Writer. I pasted a few pages of text into a document, changed line breaks into paragraph marks, eliminated double paragraph marks, and formatted the paragraphs to 0 pts before and 3 pts after. I decided to do a Save As to preserve my work. I realized I wanted a date from the top of the document. I closed the Save As dialog, navigated to the top of page 1, and tried again to save the document. The two step path I tried to save to under "My Documents" was gone, no trace. I've done a thorough search. I've asked on the AOO forum and been assured that AOO could not have caused the problem.

Does this ring any bells?

thanks

baumgrenze

linnemeyerhere said:

So you want to set up two Crucial ssd's in raid then set up two 10k WD 74GB spinners in raid to mirror the ssd raid?

Thanks for persisting,

This is not the case at all. Everywhere I looked I've encountered the mantra, "RAID is not a backup." Well, maybe not on the Intel Communities forum website, but otherwise.

It is clear that there is another a steep learning curve to select an imaging backup approach that will work when a disk fails or some malware wipes out a set of photo files or music I've captured from 78 rpm shellac recordings from 110 years ago.

I'm here to learn. I'm also here to be told, don't trust that software; this approach really works. I hope I will hear something approaching a consensus.

thanks

baumgrenze