Good day,
I have 2 internal hard drives (WD 2.0 and 1.5, both green) which I want to put in an external rack with 4 slots. The rack (Hornettek) is supposedly JBOD, but the divers were shortly used to test another rack, which functioned only in RAID.
When I put the drives in the rack, they behave like a single drive and despite many attempts (BIOS, drivers, etc.) I have not managed to disentangle tem,
Can somebody tell me how to make those drives behave again like individual drives. Here are a few scenario of what I did:
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i put both drives in the rack and they function in RAID 9 spanning mode
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I put only one drive in the rack, but it is not recognized
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i put a different JBOD drive in the rack and it behaves normally as an individual drive.
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I connect the rack with another computer and it shows the same computer.
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I find nothing in the BIOS that would allow me to change the RAID setting.
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I reformatted the drives in the rack, but also in the computer slot. When in the last case I put it back in the rack, it behaves again as part of a RAID.
The 2 drives do not appear individually in the Device manager, but combined as “HzW RAID 0 (spanning)”.
It seems to me that it is the combination of the rack which is at stake, but how to undo it?
Would a radical reformatting of the drives help? I understand the RAID mode is sometimes put on a hidden sector on the drive? If so, how to clean it? Would enybody know how to reset the Hornettek? The manufacturer does not reply.
A reinstallation of the C drive with OS? I am ready to do anything before throwing disks and Rack out of the window (I kive on the ground floor with a with thick grass under the windows, so throwing things out of the windowwill do me good, but damage nothing)
Please advice.
Thanks
I take it its this? http://www.hornettek.com/hdd-enclosure/3-5-quad-bay-jbod.html
I looked through the instructions and they are horrible. They are constantly saying JBOD (Just a bunch of disks, which means a linear combination of the disks) but then also “4 HDDs are operated distin ctively, Plug & Play, and Hot swappable”. Clearly, both can’t be true…
That being said, my first question is, back when you had them configured in raid, did you use software (configured by the OS itself), firmware (e.g. Intel Matrix RAID) or hardware raid (proper hw controller)?
Because if you had it configured via your operating system, the RAID will persist and you will have to release the raid configuration the same way you first configured it. I do not know if firmware raid is also still plausible if you use eSATA to connect to the HDD bay, so if you used firmware raid, reset that as well.
if you still don’t get individual disks, grab dban to clean the hdds individually.
if it is really determined by the data written in the HPA (host protected area), you should read this wiki article and confirm that there is an HPA on the drives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area
if there is, you can try the listed tools there to remove the HPA. I haven’t done it yet, since I never had to, so I can’t really help you further than that
Thanks for your response. This is very helpful.
Yes, it is the fack model from the link, except that Amazon France does not indicate JBOD. It is somewhere in the description.
The first model with which I configured those drives in raid was Fantec. But Fantec adds an R for raid to the article number. I simply had not paid attention and sent the rack back when they confirmed it could only function as raid. However I never thought of undoing those settings and I am not even sure that was possible.
Anyway, your response gave me a number of options to follow up on. I am travelling righ now, but when I am back home in a week, I will let you know which solution worked.
Thanks
