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I inherited decommissioned server HDDs from work. I plugged both into my PC at home, but it looks like they're both enabled for RAID, as I can't unlink them in GParted to use as separate storages.

Is there a way for me to turn off the RAID between these two HDDs without having their original server? I tried to format one with ext4 and the other with NTFS, but even that doesn't seem to be separating them.

In this screenshot, /dev/sda/ is my first HDD and /dev/sdb/ is my second HDD.

What I see in GParted

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    In GParted > Devices > New partition table...
    – user931000
    Aug 16, 2019 at 18:28

2 Answers 2

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RAID status is just metadata stored on the disk, much like partitions or filesystems or LVMs, and can be erased in the same way.

Linux has two programs which recognize different RAID metadata formats: dmraid (part of device-mapper) and mdadm (does its own thing).

  1. Your RAID volume is under "/dev/mapper", which means it has been assembled through device-mapper. Use either dmraid -an or dmsetup remove <device> to temporarily deactivate it:

    dmsetup remove ddf1_Backups1
    

    For /dev/md names the command would be mdadm --stop <device>.

  2. Then use wipefs or similar to clear all metadata (RAIDs, partition tables, and so on) and prevent the RAID setup from being recognized in the future:

    wipefs --all /dev/sda
    wipefs --all /dev/sdb
    

    (You can also zero out the beginning and/or end of both disks, but wipefs does its job faster.)

  3. Finally create regular partition tables using GParted, fdisk, or gdisk.

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Delete and recreate the partitions. This should wipe any RAID configuration from them.

I've never done this for LVM, but it works for Windows software RAID.

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    With DDF (and often Linux lvm/mdraid), the partitions usually go on top of RAID. Aug 17, 2019 at 9:39

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