Forgot to break RAID 0 before trying to use drives.

[Golgatha]

So I had two 500GB Seagate drives in a RAID0 configuration and decided to break the array and use the drives individually. I forgot to break the array up on the Intel ICH7R controller before removing the disks, and now I don't have access to the old motherboard.

I've tried to low level format the drives with HDD Low Level Format Tool (found here) and I've also tried to wipe the drive with Acronis Disk Director v10. The disk shows up as a system disk every time I reformat it. This is really annoying because I can't change the drive letter, format under Vista, etc.

Anyone know of a tool that works under Vista64 or from a bootable disk that will truly restore my disks back to factory condition? I'm so frustrated I'm about to break something, so please help me and save the lives of my many electronic gizmos.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Find the Seagate SeaTools disk, it's free from Seagate and works in DOS. Last I heard, it was very similar to the old DOS Partition Magic utility just with a different GUI. A Windows 98 boot floppy and Fdisk will work also.

 

[myocardia]

I'd recommend downloading the Ultimate Boot CD. It has many utilities on it, including the one you need. I can't remember the name of the utility at the moment , but it allows you to manually edit any part of a hard drive that you want. You just need to delete the info on both of those drives' boot sectors (the very first sector). I had to do this once, when I got a boot sector virus, and I was able to save all of my data on my other partitions. IIRC, it took 3-4 minutes to do that one drive's boot sector.