I recently assembled a new system using hard drives from the previous system. They are 2 WD Black 1TB drives I HAD set up as RAID0 boot array. I re-installed them as individual drives under the IDE selection in the BIOS (the motherboard is a P6T6 WS Revolution). They show up and work fine. I deleted the partition, set up a new simple volume and did a simple format on each. They show up and/or work fine in the BIOS, Computer, and Disk Management.
I set up the new boot array (on different drives) and installed windows vista 64 ultimate. I then switched the BIOS from IDE to AHCI. When I boot the system, the 2 drives that appear as separate 1TB drives when designated as IDE, become a single 2TB drive that "requires format," (i.e., the drive appears blank and unusable) under AHCI. In Disk Management, it appears as a single drive with a small partition, a large partition, another small partition, and another large partition. When in IDE mode, no small partitions are visible. It appears that the two drives somehow "remember" they were a RAID0 pair and nothing I do seems to completely remove the data creating this problem. Anyone have any ideas how to split this pair up to be 2 separate drives when configured as AHCI. Second question--I thought that AHCI in the ICH10R would allow hot swap-safe removal of a hard drive. I even installed the Intel Matrix Storage Manager but have not been able to safely remove a hard drive (the option is NOT available). The motherboard also has a pair of Marvel eSATA ports that also do not seem to be hot swap/safe removal capable. I ended up installing a JMicron pcie card that enables hot swap. Any insight into these two issues? Thanks, Jim Maki jwm_maill...@comcast.net
