Help disabling RAID

Hey guys,

I just got my replacement P-172X FX and since everything checked out hardware-wise, I'm ready to do a clean install. The thing is, they shipped me a RAIDed computer when I requested one without RAID (apparently they only had RAIDed ones in the inventory or something. I went to the bios and in the "Advanced" tab I selected SATA RAID Enable and changed it to [Disabled]. I then inserted the vista disk and attempted to install the OS. However, when it asked me which disk I wanted to install on, it only showed me one 160GB hard drive (149 GB actually). Furthermore, when I selected it and clicked "next", it said that "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation". Did I do something wrong when disabling the RAID? What should I do?

Mods, I know that this is a double post from the Gateway subforum. I thought this forum would generate more traffic. Please delete the one on the Gateway subforum.

Edit: Went into the RAID setup and deleted the array. The OS still can't find a disk that meets its criteria. I downloaded the SATA driver and it says that "the hardware may not support installation on this disk. Please check to make sure the disk's controller is enabled in the BIOS"

 

bump

I've been on the phone with gateway since posting this... I'm still on hold.

 

You could try setting the SATA option in the BIOS from AHCI to Compatibility. But im not totally sure this is the issue, as Vista should be able to read SATA natively..

 

When you turn your laptop on, press F2 or delete to enter the BIOS (sometimes called setup)
Then go into the different bios selections and look for harddrive.
You are looking for something called "SATA RAID"
You want to disable SATA RAID,
this will automatically force the software based raid controller to go into spanning mode, which allows two harddrives to work independently of each other.

I hope this helps, I dont have this laptop, but its what you are looking for.

K-TRON

 

Did you read his post at all? He already did this.

 

Sorry man, I didnt read the whole thing.

Before disabling sata raid, you should have went into the raid manager. (usually by pressing tab after the bios boots)
Then you have to destroy the array. It basically unlinks the drives and destroys any of the previous raid array's information.
You will need to do this before reinstalling an operating system on an individual drive.

Right now it is seeing that their is an array present, but only one drive being read, (cause you disabled SATA RAID too soon). then Vista tries to load files and cannot since the second drive is missing.
Destroy the current array through the raid manager and installation of Vista will work fine.

K-TRON