Can we turn an "unconfigured drive" into a RAID0 Array without destroying the data?

[muzza9999]

We recently upgraded to ESXi 7 - and moved away from booting from SD Cards. As we had never had a failure booting from SD Card we figured we'd just boot from a single SSD. We had multiple Hosts to do this on. For the first couple the technician just "used" the drive and as a consequence these drives are reported as "unconfigured" despite being able to successfully boot from them. After the first couple the approacch was to make the single disk SSD RAID0  - this added the valuable feature of enabling the "Do not remove LED" on the drive caddy.

So we want to take these single drive and turn them into RAID0 ( only ever be one Drive ) without destroying the data and the ability to boot ESXi from the new RAID0 ( single drive ). 

HPE Smart Array P408i-p SR Gen10

Your input would be appreciated.

[BPSingh]

Greetings!

If we re-configure drive from Non-Raid (unconfigured state) to RAID mode, there is a high chance that the existing data will be inaccessile/data loss. It is recommended to take backup of the data if any or if it just the boot drive then the OS needs to be re-installed after changing to RAID mode.