Hi guys, hope someone can help.

I have a friend who's brought me his Dell XPS to fix. It's set up with 2x WD 1TB drives in a RAID-0 array.

Yeah, I know- whose idea was that?

The situation is that the system sort-of worked, but it was occasionally putting out RAID error messages, and any attempt to use MS Backup would just freeze the system.

He's managed to save all the important data onto a USB-connected disk, so is happy to trash the system.
However, when I try to install a fresh Win7, it says: "Windows cannot be installed to that partition". It doesn't say *why*.

Am I right in assuming that at least one disk is banjaxed, possibly the WD firmware problems you hear about?

The files copied off seem to be valid.

Is the RAID just a software thing, or is there a controller in the process somewhere? There's a BIOS setting to set RAID on or off.

He's happy for me to put some new drives in place and rebuild from scratch, but if the RAID itself is knackered or the motherboard has a problem, that's not going to help, is it?

Probably one or both drives have bad sectors by the sound of it.

I would imagine new drives would work ok!

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Get ur hands on MHDD and run a full surface scan on both drives. This will verify if bads are ur problem.