How to remove raid information from a disk drive or disk image

Question

One of the drives in a (Intel fake-)RAID array in one of the computers for one of our tools has failed, the other is showing signs that it may be failing as well (bad blocks, SMART indicates lots of read errors and seek errors), so I made an exact copy of the disk with ddrescue, less some bad blocks it couldn't recover. With the drive attached to my laptop, I can mount the file systems and poke around without issue, so it seems the data is intact. Unfortunately, the computer isn't accepting the duplicated disk. I assume this is because it's a copy of a drive that was formerly part of a RAID-1 setup; the MB BIOS shows it as a "non-member disk", or similar. If I try to boot with that as the only drive connected, it will say that no bootable device is connected or similar. If I try to boot with both this and the other still working (for now) drive connected, windows immediately blue screens and reboots. What would I need to do to non-destructively either a) get the disk to be part of the RAID or b) get it to recognize the disk as a standalone not-RAID disk? This is a computer associated with a very old tool, running proprietary software the installers for which we don't have access to, so if there is a non-destructive way we could get things back up and going, it would be cool. For now, the system is still running, with the single drive that hasn't failed yet, but is showing signs that it might fail soon. I'm fairly certain the system is running windows vista, and the partition layout is as such:

Disk /dev/sda: 232.89 GiB, 250059350016 bytes, 488397168 sectors
Disk model: 00-1BD141       
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x84d44ed5

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *         2048    206847    204800   100M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          206848 483977215 483770368 230.7G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       483977216 488171519   4194304     2G  f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda4       488171520 488386559    215040   105M 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda5       483979264 488171519   4192256     2G  6 FAT16

Thanks in advance for any assistance one might decide to render :)

-Dustin

Answer 1

I guess that the RAID information occupies some sectors at the beginning followed by a regular disk structure, beginning with the master boot record.

I would simply use a hex editor such as HxD for instance to see if the master boot record starts at LBA=0 (logical block address) or later.

To find the MBR (master boot record) search for its signature 55AA (hex) at the end of the sector.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Boot_Record

If the MBR is not at LBA=0 but is located some sectors away I would simple duplicate the disk starting with the MBR sector until its end to another drive using dd under linux.

Please let us know if that works!