doclarse

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Jan 13, 2004
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I was using 2 160GB WD drives in RAID0 with Win XP. I rebuilt my computer and moved both 160GB drives to a Win 2003 server. One of the drives works fine, but the other one doesn't. I can format it and it shows up in Disk Management as healthy (active), but as 300GB, not 149GB like the other one.

When I format it, everything appears to work correctly. If I then try to open the drive in windows explorer, it says the drive is not formatted.

What am I missing and how do I recover this drive?

Thanks.
 

NewbieTechGodII

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That is odd. And it also happened to me as well, though one of the drives became unreadable or something and switched to PIO mode (as opposed to its being a SATA 300 drive).

I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I am using the platters as techy coasters.
 

ghettofreeryder

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I had the same problem once, with 4 300 gb hds in a raid 0. What i did to fix the problem was delete the partitions in windows, then reboot and reformat once back into windows. Not sure if the reboot is necessary, but give it a try and let me know
 

SomeJoe7777

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I was using 2 160GB WD drives in RAID0 with Win XP. I rebuilt my computer and moved both 160GB drives to a Win 2003 server. One of the drives works fine, but the other one doesn't. I can format it and it shows up in Disk Management as healthy (active), but as 300GB, not 149GB like the other one.

When I format it, everything appears to work correctly. If I then try to open the drive in windows explorer, it says the drive is not formatted.

The drive still has the partition information from the RAID array on it. You need to get rid of this information so you can start clean.

The easiest way is with a drive overwrite utility like Active @ Killdisk. This will make a boot floppy or boot CD-ROM that will allow you to wipe the disk. Be careful with it, make sure you wipe the correct disk (look carefully at the drive sizes, manufacturer's of the drives, etc.)

You may also try a simpler method of deleting the partition in Windows disk management, and then creating a new one. This technically doesn't erase all of the partition table, but it might erase enough of it to make Windows see the correct drive size.
 

doclarse

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It worked! Finally. I deleted the partition and then rebooted. Once I logged back into Windows, I recreated the partition and formatted it. It looks like that did it. For now, anyway.

Thanks for the help.
 

Morpheus

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Hi all

Hope i don't violate agains any rules by bumping this thread, but since it helped me i felt to give a little thanks for that ...

@ SomeJoe7777

Thank you so much for that idea with the KillDisk (Bootable Disc). I had to re-arrange a raid0 config on a new system and i was not able to delete the old (and splitted) raid0 partitions on those two harddrives. Since fdisk failed (showed a delete, but didnt) i felt a little helpless. And Asus Support is rotten ... then i found your posting @ nr.1 in google.

Cheers,
Morph

P.S. I guess the ultimate solution would be to delete all partitions bevor ripping it out of the old system.