Problem adding new sata drive with existing sata raid drives

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by kborom, Aug 17, 2010.

  1. kborom

    kborom Member

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    Hi,

    Cannot find any similar question here so my problem is as follows. I have a PC with 2 HDD's in raid on sata connections. I only had 320GB so bought a new 1TB one, installed it (not as raid) and installed Win 7 on it with the other HDD's disconnected. This worked fine.

    I then wanted to add back the original 2 HDD's so I could access the data as slave drives, but whenever I add them in my PC does not recognise the 1TB drive so won't boot. I have been in and out of the relevant bios settings but cannot seem to get the new HDD recognised.

    Does anyone know if what I am doing is possible? If so, how could I achieve that?

    Let me know if you need more info, and all help appreciated!

    Cheers.


    edit - think I may have sorted it, my options in BIOS indicate that it will always look for the os on a raid first - this seems to be the case even if that drive is removed from the boot selection list. Thanks Dell!!

    So I have decided to boot from raid but link in the new HDD and copy everything from raid to the Win 7 hdd, and then I can disconnect the raid and clear the OS from the raid at my convenience - or just format the drives.
    Seems to be the easiest route.
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2010
  2. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    in the bios, goto the boot setup, goto the hd priority or similar & change the hd listing so that the 1tb hd is 1st. i would use a smaller drive for windows & bigger drive for data.
     
  3. kborom

    kborom Member

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    Thanks for the response. I did try that and even when removing the raid hdd's from the list altogether it still refused to boot - seems to be a clash with the 2 OS's.

    Sorted now though, cheers again!
     
  4. KillerBug

    KillerBug Active member

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    The problem is that your new drive should have been setup as a single-drive RAID array. If you have it working form the mirror, then great...but this might help you the next time you need to reinstall windows.

    BTW...you can do something like what you have done with a USB drive...I had my laptop setup like that for a while; the internal hard drive had windows on it, but all the boot files were on a PicoUSB drive that I kept on my keychain...no keychain, no boot...it all worked really well until the PicoUSB drive failed and I was no longer able to access my encrypted HDD partition.
     

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