How do I move my OS from a RAID array to a single drive?

apologies Bev.  I have misled you.  I have a mirrored pair of disks (which are raid 1 not raid 0 as I originally said!).   The mirrored pair is setup as a single partition (logically named C) with Xp installed there.

I want to reinstall XP on the non-raid disk, and leave the raid pair exactly as they are but without XP on them (would be good if I could also work out how to reassign the drive letters too!)

thanks for your help :)

Here are some steps that might help.

1) Get a good drive imaging software. I suggest Acronis. Make a CD Boot disk using this software.

2) Create a drive image of you Windows setup on the RAID Drives and store it on a DVD or on a partition on your Non-RAID drive.

3a) Use the WinXP setup disk to format/delete your existing Windows active partition/drive.

3b) Use the WinXP setup disk to install WinXP on the "first" partition of your non-RAID drive setting this partition as the Active parition. The drive C dsignation should automatically be changed to 'C' if not use the same application to change it.

4)Use the (Acronis) Boot disk to restore the 'original' image copied from the Raid Drive to the new active partition on the non-RAID drive.

5)Grab a cold Beer.

I have done this on several computers without issue. Hope it helps. Cheers

Thanks to all.  I actually managed this at the weekend without having to reinstall WinXP.

If anyone else is interested (doesnt seem likely) here's what I did.

1. Disconnect one of the two RAID 1 drives (where Windows was installed) to act as a data backup.
2. Re-boot and the BIOS told me one of the mirrored drives had failed.  I accepted this message and the machine booted OK.
3. I then tried to break the mirrror using the Intel Storage Utility, but it wouldnt let me since the RAID pair are the system disk.
4. I re-booted and hit Ctrl+I to enter the RAID BIOS, and deleted the RAID array here (I think it was option 3).  Contrary to the literature, this didnt destroy the contents of my connected RAID 1 disk, it simply reset it to a Non-RAID disk. (NOTE my other RAID disk which had WinXP on it was still disconnected and therefore a safe fallback if everything went wrong!)
5. I then tried to re-boot, and got the error message that there was no Operating System...
6. I checked the boot order, and made the internal SATA drive my primary boot device... but still no joy :(
7. I then physically moved this drive to Port 0 inside the machine, and hey-presto, I'm back in WinXP with all settings still intact :)  It seems that the BIOS only looks for the OS on the first drive (port 0) ???
8. I then shutdown agina, reattached the other drive and restarted.  The BIOS start-up screen now listed the drive which I had just reconnected as a RAID drive, and the other two as Non-RAID.  Ignoring this, the machine booted into Win OK.
9. Using the Intel Storage Utility I was then able to delete the remaining 'array' (which only contained one disk) and was left with three independent hard disks - one of which was on Port 0 and had Win XP on it.
10. Finally I formatted and partitioned the RAID disk (D:) which still had the Windows backup on it, to give me two blank disks ready for a RAID array.

From here it was just a case of re-creating a RAID 1 array on the two non-system disks.  To do this I first had to reset the BIOS to "RAID ON" per the user guide to get all the options in the Intel Storage Utility to be active again.  The new RAID pair were then recreated from within Windows.

The final step was to reset the RAID setting in the BIOS to "RAID/AHDI" (factory setting) from "RAID On".

I now have a single drive with WinXP on it, and a pair of RAID1 drives which are completely empty.... and I didnt get my WinXP CD out if the packet!