I'm working on a hopefully unrelated question question and I've got to a strange situation.

First: I know very little about the very low level hardware kernal storage driver magix, so I'm hoping a) someone can help and b) someone can explain it to me better.

I've been trying a dozen different configurations of my 2x500GB SATA drives over the past few hours involving switching between ACHI/IDE/RAID in my bios; After each attempt I've reset the bios option, booted into a live CD, deleting partitions and rewriting partition tables left on the drives.

Now, however, I've been sitting with a /dev/mapper/nvidia_XXXXXXX1 that seems to be impossible to kill!

its the only 'partition' that i see in the Ubuntu install (but I can see the others in parted) but it is only the size of one of the drives, and I know I did not set any RAID levels other than RAID0.

Anyone have any ideas how I can kill this and get back to just two independent IDE drives? Or can anyone convince me of a reason to go the AHCI route?

Many thanks in advance.