Deleting recovery partition and disabling RAID

liamw

Hi all,

I want to clean up my HDD partitions so I have some questions. MY HDD configuration is 2 SATA 1TB drives in RAID0 configuration.

1. How can I delete the 110MB and RECOVERY partitions as below? I have a feeling that the OS won't boot if I do this as the boot sector will have changed position?

2. How is it that there are 2 logical disks (Disk0 and Disk1) when the HDDs are supposed to be RAIDed to appear as one disk?

3. If I disable RAID after doing all the above, will I see Disk0 and Disk1 with each showing 1TB space? Ideally this is the configuration I want as I will be adding another 2TB drive soon.

Thanks in advance for your help.

jpl888

1. Deleting the recovery partition might change the boot sector but it will also effect how the machine accesses the drive. Off the top of my head with Windows you will need to edit boot.ini (possibly with bootcfg.exe) and change it to reflect the system partition now being the first on the drive. However, I don't know why you would want to go to all that effort to free up 110MB of space. You're better off just leaving it.

2. Possibly that whatever RAID 0 config you have is configured with 2 volumes/disks. Going into the RAID utility (probably at boot up) and looking at the config there would help. At this point do not be tempted to change anything unless you want to lose the partitions and data. If you look at the sizes of each partition and add them up you are around the 2TB mark so it must be configured that way.

3. Yes if you disable RAID you will see both disks separately but if you do that your OS and data will be gone. Best to image the partitions somewhere before you do!

liamw

jpl888 wrote: »

1. Deleting the recovery partition might change the boot sector but it will also effect how the machine accesses the drive. Off the top of my head with Windows you will need to edit boot.ini (possibly with bootcfg.exe) and change it to reflect the system partition now being the first on the drive. However, I don't know why you would want to go to all that effort to free up 110MB of space. You're better off just leaving it.

Thanks for the reply.

With Windows7 the tool is bcdedit.exe. It's more than 110MB.. it's the 8GB recovery partition too.

I'm going to try doing everything in Partition Magic since I believe this should edit the boot configuration.

jpl888 wrote: »

2. Possibly that whatever RAID 0 config you have is configured with 2 volumes/disks. Going into the RAID utility (probably at boot up) and looking at the config there would help. At this point do not be tempted to change anything unless you want to lose the partitions and data. If you look at the sizes of each partition and add them up you are around the 2TB mark so it must be configured that way.

That is an interesting configuration. Disk1 set up to only have 63GB. I will load up the BIOS tomorrow and see if I can figure out what's going on.

jpl888 wrote: »

3. Yes if you disable RAID you will see both disks separately but if you do that your OS and data will be gone. Best to image the partitions somewhere before you do!

Hmmm ye RAID0 is striping so may not be a good idea even disabling this as I may lose performance. If I add a new 2TB HDD I assume it will just show up as a seperate disk and not be included in the original RAID? Is that how it works?

jpl888

liamw wrote: »

Thanks for the reply.

With Windows7 the tool is bcdedit.exe. It's more than 110MB.. it's the 8GB recovery partition too.

God damn Microsoft changing the names of utilities for the sake of it and to make an extra buck with training! As long as you are sure your recovery DVD is in good order then deleting the recovery is ok.

liamw wrote: »

I'm going to try doing everything in Partition Magic since I believe this should edit the boot configuration.

Yes Partition Magic will try to do everything for you. Try being the operative word.

liamw wrote: »

That is an interesting configuration. Disk1 set up to only have 63GB. I will load up the BIOS tomorrow and see if I can figure out what's going on.

I think it must me configured that way but we'll see.

liamw wrote: »

Hmmm ye RAID0 is striping so may not be a good idea even disabling this as I may lose performance. If I add a new 2TB HDD I assume it will just show up as a seperate disk and not be included in the original RAID? Is that how it works?

Yes well RAID 0 should be the fastest but then it is also the most fragile. If either one of the disks goes then your partitions will be borked! Twice as much chance of that happening because it's 2 disks.

I suppose it's possible that the RAID utility could pick the drive up automatically but I doubt it will without at least asking you.

liamw

Alright, I think I've figured out a bit.

When I load the BIOS settings I see this information in two sections:
CMOS
SATA1: Hard Drive -> 1TB
SATA2: Hard Drive -> 1TB

Boot Configuration
Hard Disk1: Intel RAID Array0
Hard Disk2: Intel RAID Array1

There is also an option to select RAID/AHCI which is currently set to RAID.
If I change this to AHCI, I assume I'm effectly disabling the RAID?

Loading up 'Intel Rapid Storage' utility within Windows shows this:


... which explains the logical Disk1 showing up as 65GB in 'Disk Management'.

So, here's what I think I'll do. Let me know if you think this is the best option (in terms of securing data - striping seems risky):

1. Back up all my data to an external drive.
2. Get a new internal SATA HDD 2TB and attach it to SATA3 port.
3. Go into the BIOS, switch RAID to AHCI.
4. Reinstall Windows7 onto the first HDD.
5. Now I would expect to see 3 Drives show up in 'Disk Management' and My Computer - 1TB (the OS), 1TB, 2TB
6. Set up a new primary partition on Disk1 in case the OS corrupts (I think this is always a good idea).

Let me know what you think The part I'm skeptical about is whether I need to delete all the partitions manually at any stage?

jpl888

liamw wrote: »

So, here's what I think I'll do. Let me know if you think this is the best option (in terms of securing data - striping seems risky):

1. Back up all my data to an external drive.
2. Get a new internal SATA HDD 2TB and attach it to SATA3 port.
3. Go into the BIOS, switch RAID to AHCI.
4. Reinstall Windows7 onto the first HDD.
5. Now I would expect to see 3 Drives show up in 'Disk Management' and My Computer - 1TB (the OS), 1TB, 2TB
6. Set up a new primary partition on Disk1 in case the OS corrupts (I think this is always a good idea).

Let me know what you think The part I'm skeptical about is whether I need to delete all the partitions manually at any stage?

I'm not sure what you mean by step 6. perhaps you could elaborate?

Everything else sounds reasonable. No you won't need to delete partitions when you change to ACHI mode it will wipe everything for you.

The most secure form or RAID is mirroring (level 1) but then you effectively halve throughput.

liamw

jpl888 wrote: »

I'm not sure what you mean by step 6. perhaps you could elaborate?

Everything else sounds reasonable. No you won't need to delete partitions when you change to ACHI mode it will wipe everything for you.

The most secure form or RAID is mirroring (level 1) but then you effectively halve throughput.

For Step6 I just mean to partition the disk, so that I have the OS on one partition, and data on the other. That way, if the OS goes bust (with a virus or corrupt boot sector or whatever), I can reformat to a clean OS without affecting the data on other partition.

Indeed, RAID1 would be optimal, but I just happen to have about 6 or 7 500GB drives lying around so I'll just backup periodically to them instead. Also, not sure how the RAID1 would need to be configured if I have 3 drives of 1TB,1TB,2TB - could be awkward

Will give this a shot and let you know how it goes. Thanks.

jpl888

liamw wrote: »

For Step6 I just mean to partition the disk, so that I have the OS on one partition, and data on the other. That way, if the OS goes bust (with a virus or corrupt boot sector or whatever), I can reformat to a clean OS without affecting the data on other partition.

Indeed, RAID1 would be optimal, but I just happen to have about 6 or 7 500GB drives lying around so I'll just backup periodically to them instead. Also, not sure how the RAID1 would need to be configured if I have 3 drives of 1TB,1TB,2TB - could be awkward

Will give this a shot and let you know how it goes. Thanks.

Ok step 6 sounds cool too.

RAID 1 relies on 2 disks of identical capacity. Can't recommend RAID 5 or any of the others due to array rebuilding problems with corrupt files.

On my Linux server at home I have 2 external USB 320GB drives configured in a software RAID 1 array for backing up to. I can also swap for another drive so I can take a disk off-site so to speak.

Not sure how you would do that setup with Windows.