I would just leave it as a backup drive until you feel like reinstalling windows, at which point you can use the 2 drives in RAID.
Maybe this is a dumb idea, but is it possible to partition magic the 300gb to 250gb+50gb and then set the 250 gb on mirror with his new drive (to have 250gb raid1 + 50gb backup / unpartitioned)?
Jo
No.
You can't RAID the drives without deleting
everything on
both of them.
You could RAID1 a 250 and a 300 but your RAID1 would be 250GB but again you have to
wipe both drives clean to make the array then put the OS and data back on and you cannot do that without having a 3rd storage device to put the data on temporarily.
Oh! I didn't know that. I guess I'll have to get something like Norton Ghost to mirror the old drive to the new one (as long as I don't use more than 250gb of space) or just copy my important files and folders occasionally.
There is a free and open source solution to this problem.
Download and install
http://cygwin.com/setup.exe along with rsync
Then all you have to do is run this command to backup your data:
[code:1:efe3117803]
rsync -alprtv /cygdrive/c/ /cygdrive/d/
[/code:1:efe3117803]
The problem is windows will prevent you from copying certain files, however user data should copy fine.
See here for the rsync documentation:
http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/documentation.html
GL :-D