RAID1 Help

[Tinieblas]

Here's the situation... I've got a Dell Inspiron 531s running Windows Vista Home Premium with 2GB of RAM and dual 250GB hard drives set up as a single 250GB RAID1 MIRROR. Just being my personal computer I would much rather have 500GB of storage than 250GB, even if it means less security. So, I posted on a Dell forum asking how to get rid of the RAID, and someone quickly responded. I did what they said and now I can't get my computer to do anything...

The BIOS still shows both drives as being recognized, and the RAID setup still shows them, but if I just let my computer run it brings up a screen that displays

No boot device detected
SATA0: (disk info for HD1)
SATA1: (disk info for HD2)
SATA2: (disk info for DVD drive)
SATA3:

I don't know if you need more info or what, but I really don't know anything about RAID and am just hoping that there's a way to fix it. Please Help!

[patio]

What did Dell have you do ? ?
I'm not 100% sure on this but you normally have to re-install your OS after eliminating a RAID array.

[Tinieblas]

This is what I was told,

"Assuming that you have RAID1 [Mirror] Boot the system, enter the RAID BIOS setup, select Delete Raid Volume and set the drives to a non-RAID configuration.
With RAID 1, you should have 2 hard drives that are exactly the same, after this, you can partition and format the second hard drive.
You will receive a message saying, the RAID volume data will be lost, this is a true statement for RAID 0, but not for RAID 1 and can be ignore, your data on the RAID 1 volumes should be safe.
After exiting, you should see two hard drives as Non-Raid either immediately or after a reboot."

So yeah... Anyways, I pulled out one of the drives to see if I could reformat just one of them, but then the RAID went all crazy and Windows wouldn't even recognize there was a drive there. I put both back in and just completely removed all RAID settings, reformatted both drives together and then finally was able to reinstall Windows on just one and the other is now formatted and blank... and RAID free...

Luckily my computer does a weekly backup to an external hard drive, so I didn't end up losing much. But it was quite the experience...