I inherited a pc from my father about a year ago, nothing was wrong with the machine, he simply passed away. With money being kind of tight, I went to get all the specs today, so I could sell it. I was going to pull one of the drives out, so I could toss it into another machine that I'm selling, and was not aware there was a raid installation. Truthfully, I'm generally fairly knowledgable with PCs, but servers and raid configurations are both out of my spectrum of practical knowledge. So... I had no idea that unplugging one of the mirrored drives and trying to boot would cause such a problem. Long story short, I killed the drive integrity of each of the mirrored drives for the raid, and now I'm trying to rebuild. I originally tried just using the windows disc that came with the system (XP Service Pack 2 pro), but it would get through formatting the drives and reboot to the more 'windows looking' portion of the installation, then it would freeze at 34 minutes left while on the 'installing devices' phase. I've since formatted all drives, and even found the partition\raid setup disc, and disabled\removed all raid functionality. Windows setup won't install any way that I do it, removing\disabling a drive, leaving both drives in, completely deleting partitions and reformatting them...... None of it seems to work. It's still getting to 34% with every try.
Not sure if you checked this already but the raid could be set up thru your motherboard's bios. If this is the case you will have access the raid menu during boot by pressing f8 or something like that to clear the raid. Once you clear the raid it may erase all the data on the drives. Then restart the setup procedure on the drive. Hope this helps you.
Just had another thought if u know the hdd manufactur you can use the utility tools and zero the hdd (low lvl format) and then reset up the drive. This can take some time depending on the size of the drive. I would recommend doing the whole drive not just part of it. Good luck let me know if this works if not i will see what else i can figure out.
