How to remove RAID flag on unstriped drive without losing data?
- by Alex Folland
I have a Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3 motherboard. It advertises this new thing called "XHD", which is like RAID but makes a SSD and traditional-style drive work together to enable high speed with high capacity. I don't want to use this feature, and I already have Windows 7 64 installed without using this feature.
When I first installed my 2 hard drives (1 SSD and 1 traditional-style drive) in my machine and booted it up for the first time, it ran a program from the mobo that asked me if I wanted to set up XHD. Thinking it would go to some config screen, I said yes. It immediately started doing something with my drives and finished. I considered that strange, but figured it wouldn't matter when I simply install Windows onto my SSD only. I now have my BIOS and Windows running in AHCI mode with no RAID arrays and separate drives.
My SSD is one of those new Corsair Force GT drives which loses power every so often, causing Windows to BSOD. I've figured everything out about this problem, including installing the latest firmware from Corsair, and the only way to fix it at this point is by installing Intel Rapid Storage Technology to control AHCI instead of Windows, since the Windows AHCI driver disables the drive's power every once in a while and can't be configured not to do so.
I've tried installing Intel Rapid Storage Technology. When I reboot my machine after doing so, it BSODs just after the Windows logo. I've figured out this is because my SSD and my traditional drive are flagged as RAID, as seen in the "Intel Matrix Storage Manager" program found by switching the BIOS hard drive handling to "RAID" mode. This is due to the XHD auto-config program I mentioned earlier.
Normally, the BIOS is set to AHCI, and when the drives boot in AHCI mode, they work perfectly. So, I've concluded the data is stored in AHCI mode but the drives' flags are set to RAID.
I've figured out that I can accomplish my objective by using the "Intel Matrix Storage Manager" program on the mobo (with "Reset disks to non-RAID"), but doing so would cause it to completely wipe the drives I select. I want to simply toggle these flags from RAID to AHCI so Intel Rapid Storage Technology doesn't fail and cause a BSOD upon booting, but without wiping the drives.
