I'm trying to convert a server from Windows to Centos. It has two 160GB drives that I want to use independently, no RAID.

The only choice the Centos installer offers is
The Windows server was RAID1 (for no good reason) using a Promise FastTrak TX2300.

Initially, I changed the BIOS setting for the FastTrak from RAID1 to JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). That made the BIOS and the Mepis installer see the drives as independent. I did a test install with Mepis (because I know Mepis and don't know Centos). But I need Centos for the server to play well in this local network.

I tried Centos and had the above described error. Then I removed the FastTrak controller and connected both drives directly to the motherboard and still have the same problem. I can't get Centos to see two independent drives rather than one RAID1.

Not exactly solved, but I'm past the problem.

After trying several other things that didn't help, I restarted Mepis and initialized a swap partition at the beginning of sdb.

When I switched back to Centos, it then saw the two drives seperately.

Initially, I had left the Windows contents (half of the original RAID1) undisturbed on sdb, having only deleted the RAID at the BIOS level. Later, I tried deleting the NTFS partition on sdb (using gparted in Mepis) and even that didn't let Centos see the drives separate. But when I initialized a swap partition on sdb, that finally overwrote whatever leftover information from the previous RAID1 Centos was finding on sdb and which I couldn't make it ignore.