Acer predator 17 intel sata array

My question relates to Intel Rapid Storage Technology. My Predator 17 has two hard drives - primary SSD (256 GB) and secondary HDD (1 TB).

At first boot I accidentaly clicked on "Create array" and now the secondary HDD serves as a Recovery disk for the primary disk. That means that the secondary disc is unacessible and cannot be used for storage. Before posting this question I did the following:

- did a factory reset / did not work.

- reinstalled windows 10 with an image i got off Windows website / did not work.

- took out the secondary hdd, booted the computer without it, put the hdd in / did not work.

- tried changing the booting rules in bios / did not work.

By "did not work" in all four cases I mean that after booting the HDD was still in the array and it was still unusable.

Is there anything else I can do to get the HDD "back"?

Please advise. Thank you.

Accepted answers

IronFly

Read the solution and the last user post about having the HDD recognised:

http://community.acer.com/t5/Predator-Laptops/Predator-15-G9-593-Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-problem/td-p/471315/page/2

this is the only way to recover the HDD at the moment, still waiting for a BIOS update to disable RAID option and enable AHCI only.

All comments

IronFly

can you post the exact predator model?

DomenSa

Acer Predator 17 G9-793

DomenSa

sorry for the typo about the model. It's 17, not 19.

IronFly

Read the solution and the last user post about having the HDD recognised:

http://community.acer.com/t5/Predator-Laptops/Predator-15-G9-593-Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-problem/td-p/471315/page/2

this is the only way to recover the HDD at the moment, still waiting for a BIOS update to disable RAID option and enable AHCI only.

EmperorBorg

Externally formating the HDD will terminate the RAID.

Hopefully, future UEFI versions will support a non-RAID (SATA only) mode to evoid any confusion.

DomenSa

Quick update. Managed to solve it but it was not easy. The trick is just formating the SSD does not do the trick. Apparently, when you turn the RAID on, it stays on. I've managed to disable the RAID setting by booting the system off a linux USB stick and then manually deleting several files which were related to the RAID.

EmperorBorg

Completely deleting the drives does destroy the RAID info also, but you have to erase them either by connecting them externally or with special tools.