And I can't seem to get it booted or assigned. I went into setup and turned on the appropriate SATA port then rebooted. My PC reported new hardware installed and reported the proper item. A 1.5TB hard drive.
I cannot see it in Explorer.
I have the SATA operation set for RAID On but I'm wondering if it needs to be set to RAID Autodetect. The setup screen tells me I need to switch to Autodetect if I have more than 1 hard drive, but it also warns me if I go to Autodetect my OS may not boot. I don't want to get the blue screen of death from a perfectly fine working computer.
I have the factory drive in SATA 0, the new drive in SATA 1 and the 2 DVD-ROMs in SATA 4 & 5. The PC works fine but it's as though the drive is invisible or doesn't boot.
My PC is a Dell E520.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Rob
Did you format it?
You need to format the Hard Drive.
START > CONTROL PANEL > ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS > COMPUTER MANAGEMENT > find "Disk Management" under "Storage" in the tree.
Watch a video or read up on the internet. It isn't hard, but you should know what you are doing first.
[flash width=480 height=385] http://www.youtube.com/v/J4j1wKVpoGU?fs=1&hl=en_US [/flash]
Sorry about the accent of the person in the video. I did a quick search and didn't completely watch it.
Here is another video
[flash width=480 height=385] http://www.youtube.com/v/tkiqU8g10RY?fs=1&hl=en_US [/flash]
Actually I don't need to format it. The IT guy at work loaded it up and he formatted it before he transferred the files.
All I needed to do was connect it to my PC. SATA and power.
actually, you may have to go talk to your techie about the RAID stuff. I never tried that. Also, you should ask him if the BIOS might need to be updated to support your hard drive since it is a 1.5 TB drive. I think the larger drives may require the BIOS of your motherboard to be updated since they may not recognize the drive properly.
Also, you probably shouldn't be using a RAID configuration anyways.
Isn't the RAID an automatic backup feature? If the new disk is being used as a shadow of C: it probably wouldn't have its own drive letter?
If you're looking to see it as a separate drive, which appears to be what you want, turn RAID "OFF", or no or whatever, in the BIOS! It should come right up then.
Hope you didn't screw-up your data.
I'd agree with that. RAID is for redundancy and fault tolerance. Unless you specifically wanted it linked to your primary drive as a RAID array, you should probably turn RAID off.
I just turned the RAID off and my OS wouldn't boot.
The only thing I can think of is that the IT guy formatted the HD at work and loaded it up. I know very little about partitioning and that other fancy stuff but as pointed out earlier, it could be a BOIS or memory issue.
Back to the drawing board.:-P
BTW, the RAID On setting is defaulted that way in the PC.
No, you shouldn't consider RAID to be "automatic backups".
IF you use RAID1, you have two drives that have identical contents. If one fails, you can swap it out with a new identical drive and rebuild the array. So if you don't mind paying twice as much for your disk drives, you can get some additional "insurance" that can help you keep going easier in case of a drive failure. But you can have other failures that still kill your RAID array, so RAID should not be considered "backup". The RAID1 functionality is really meant for servers that cannot have much down time.
RAID0, or a "striping array", uses both disks as one giant logical disk, and part of each file gets written to each disk. Since both disks are being written to or read from simultaneously, this type of array speeds up disk access, and boosts your computer performance. But this is definitely not any form of "automatic backup".
There are other RAID modes that use more disks, and essentially combine the above functionalities. But none of them should be considered "automatic backups".
Where did your computer come from? Did it only have the one hard drive in it to start?
It sounds like you started with a computer that only had a single hard drive, but that hard drive was placed into a RAID array. A single-disk RAID array serves no purpose, and your computer should never have been setup that way. Since this is a configuration that has to get set BEFORE you install your OS or anything else, it's sounding like a mistake made by whoever built your computer...
So how does one go about getting rid of the RAID Array?
I have my PC ghosted to another external HD. Do I need to reload/format the PC?
Rob
Google "disable raid" There's a lot of information out there.
With RAID, as I understand it, you won't see another drive. RAID0 makes 1 big drive out of 2, storing part of the data on each drive. RAID1 mirrors the 1st drive. For other RAIDs, you need more than 2 disks.
If you added a 1.5T disk to a smaller system, say 500G, with RAID, I believe you will wind up with only a 500G, or at best a 1T system, depending on the RAID type.
Take it back to your IT guy. NOW.
Rob
On many hard drives you need to set "JUMPERS" to set the physical drive device as a primary or secondary drive. Also as dumb as it may sound, depending on which ribbon cable you are using, it may depend on which connector on the cable you use with which drive.
Rob
This is beginning to sound like the good ole days of MS-DOS ...
Rob
SATA drives don't have jumpers.
Rob
It's a SATA drive so it has no jumpers. Just a proprietary one way cable.
It has to be something to do with the RAID Array.
It's difficult to say for sure...
But if you indeed have a single drive setup in a RAID array, that would explain why your computer fails to boot when you turn the RAID off. Turning off the RAID controller makes your drive look like it's unformatted.
If it works, then yes, the best option would be to turn off the RAID array, then restore everything from your ghosted image.
