Deleting a partition

[Tunnelcat]

I'm going to be installing Win 10 on my last Win 7 computer. The OS drive has a small partition called "E" that contains the HP recovery software, which I won't need of course. It also has a 2 SSD drive configuration with a RAID setup. I'd like to get rid of that partition before I install Win 10. Any suggestions on the software to do that?

[fliptw]

you can do that in the installer, do a custom install.

[vision]

RAID drives are usually a hardware setting and configured in the BIOS/UEFI menu (It's unlikely you have a software RAID on a home PC). Just navigate to the drives/RAID page and delete the array from there. The Windows boot device should then recognize them as unformatted drives. WARNING: Deleting the RAID array will destroy all the data!

If the dual SSD array is a RAID-0 and is also your boot drive this should be super fast! Removing the RAID will give slightly slower performance. I'm not sure why you would want to break down this RAID. If you need more storage, just buy it.

[Tunnelcat]

This is a Z220 HP Workstation, so is it really a "home" computer? I'll have to boot into the BIOS/UEFI next time I use it to see how it's configured. I'm almost tempted to get rid of the RAID setup and have one OS drive and an extra storage drive because they are both small 120 GB SSD drives.

[Krom]

Installing windows on a RAID can be an epic pain in the ass too because it is unlikely the installer has a driver for it. And RAID on SSDs actually hurts the most relevant QD0 random access performance (sequential will be faster, but largely useless for an OS drive). If you need more capacity, pawn off the 120 GB drives and just buy one 256 or 512 drive, a decent SATA TLC drive is very inexpensive these days. If you needed more performance you would be looking at a build with a m.2 connector and getting a NVMe drive because most of them will perform a couple times faster than is even possible with a SATA RAID.

[vision]

This is a Z220 HP Workstation, so is it really a "home" computer?

Good point. A bunch of the HP Z-class workstations in my lab have raided OS drives so I wonder if that's just the current trend?

If you needed more performance you would be looking at a build with a m.2 connector and getting a NVMe drive because most of them will perform a couple times faster than is even possible with a SATA RAID.

Yeah, my mini-desktop at home is rocking Mint on NVMe and it's got me spoiled. Boots up in just a couple seconds.

[Tunnelcat]

Installing windows on a RAID can be an epic pain in the ass too because it is unlikely the installer has a driver for it. And RAID on SSDs actually hurts the most relevant QD0 random access performance (sequential will be faster, but largely useless for an OS drive). If you need more capacity, pawn off the 120 GB drives and just buy one 256 or 512 drive, a decent SATA TLC drive is very inexpensive these days. If you needed more performance you would be looking at a build with a m.2 connector and getting a NVMe drive because most of them will perform a couple times faster than is even possible with a SATA RAID.

I'm not going to change the motherboard at this point so won't be able to use m.2, but I might just purchase a larger SATA SSD drive for the OS and put Win 10 on that and reformat the smaller original drives and use them for storage. Maybe one of these days I'll get a new MOBO for this box. I wasn't intending on keeping the RAID anyway because I figured it was a pain, so I'll turn that off in the BIOS and then install Win 10 from my ISO file copies that I have on both a DVD and USB drive. So my next question it, if I swap the 2 current drives with a new single SSD, what's the procedure for installing Win 10? Install by booting from either a DVD or USB drive as if I'm upgrading and give MS my Win 7 license?

[Krom]

You got it, just install it off the usb drive and when it asks for a key give it your windows 7 key.

You can also just not give it a key at all, ever. It will run without a license or activation forever, it disables all the cosmetic customization features and desktop backgrounds but will play games or run web browsers or anything else just fine.

[Tunnelcat]

OK, so this has evolved from deleting a partition to replacing the 2 OS drives with a single drive. I can get a larger SSD drive for pretty cheap now. Now my question is, how to I disable or break the Intel Rapid Storage Technology RAID 1 setup and temporarily keep the OS (Win 7) until I can pull the drives and install Win 10 on a new one? I know that CTRL+i will get into the RST program during POST, so will disabling RAID from there break the RAID and do I need to change any other settings in the BIOS as well? I know this Intel RST program has to have it's hooks in the BIOS to work, so I want things changed cleanly. I want to also uninstall the Intel RST software driver afterwards too to make sure it's gone. The driver for this thing is old and even though I have a Win 10 driver, I'm not interested in creating a RAID array again.

[Krom]

I would just leave the RAID alone until you are ready to install the new drive, being a RAID1 you could probably break it without rendering the data unusable but it might require jumping through more flaming hoops than it is really worth. If there is data you need or want on it, I would copy it all off before hand using the network or USB thumb drives or something while the OS is still running.

Once you have the new drive and are ready to install the OS, just go in to BIOS and set the SATA controller mode from RST/RAID to AHCI and you're done.

[Tunnelcat]

Thanks Krom. Waiting for new drive right now. Got a 500GB Samsung SATA. That should be plenty sufficient for this office computer. I don't even think I'll use the old drives, just store them.