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Adding non raid drives to raid 1, help!

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hi there, i've searched for a while now and i cant seem to find anything so i thought i'd ask for help. i recently purchased two seagate 250gb sata drives planning to set them up as raid 1 (mirrored) and install vista onto them. did that with very few problems at all. the big issue thats been driving me crazy all day came about when i tried to add two other sata drives from my previous set up that have been used for pics/video/music etc. i plug them in, and they're recognised in bios just fine, but when vista comes to load i get the loading bar then the screen just goes blank, and the hdd light comes on solid and stays on for about a minute, then goes out for a while and seems to just repeat that?! if i set them up in bios as raid enabled windows will boot but it wants me to make them raid and i dont want that as they're already full. any ideas and input would be greatly appreciated as im loosing my mind!
i'll try to describe my set up below:

intel quad Q6600
asus striker 2 formula 780i
inno3d 260gtx
2x seagate 250gb sata 2 (raid 1) (connected to sata ports 1&2)
1x samsung 160gb sata 2 (port 3)
1xsamsung 400gb sata 2 (port 4)

its just really frustrating because i cant figure out why it wont work, and theres stuff on both the other drives i dont want to loose so im not too keen to take any risks.
thanks again for your time
rich

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I think that mobo has some external plug and play sata ports, does Vista pick them up when pluged in to that?

can you make them 2 x RAID 0 setups of 1 disk each (not really RAID) but I have had to do that in the past with older mobos.

right, first off, thanks for the suggestions.
making them individual raids sounds logical, so i gave that a go, i tried it with just the 400gb, and no success, it still did the same thing. but the option was there in my raid setup so you must be able to do it surely? is it possible that my computer would need alot of time to read the drive before windows will boot because its full? i'm going to try the same thing now but with the 160gb as its only half full, i'll just leave it and see if it eventually boots. i'll post back in a bit and let you know how it goes.
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Yes I have this setup 2 x 250 GB 7200.8 drives RAID 0 500GB disk and 250 GB disk as stand alone.

Try not adding them to RAID arrays, just keep you current RAID 0, once windows boots use disk manager (control panel > administrative tools > computer manager > Disk manager)

Try mounting the drives using this.

right, ive tried everything. and basically windows will not boot if i dont make them raid which would require formating them, so im gunna format my raid drives, add my other drives then install vista. hopefully this will work once and for all. thank you all for your input anyway.
rich
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