Dear all,
I appreciate the help,
I recently found myself running low on storage (300GB) and decided to buy a second HDD 1.5tb. Both are Sata. After having installed the new drive I couldn’t find the new space on the system. Having wondered about RAID previously I decided that I would look at the intel raid controllers and sure enough it recognized the drive. So I thought (being the first time I have ever messed with SATA drives instead of IDE) that I had to enter into a raid configuration to be able to access the new storage space. I spent nearly 4 hours running the raid configuration utility, restarted and found that I have absolutely no additional storage (the original 300GB total) but now the data is spread across both drives. I have figured out that I cannot revert to a non raid configuration and am wondering what I can do from here.
I have removed the power to one drive as a test and the data has definitely been split across both.
I can see unused space in Windows XP disk management utility totaling 300Gb but I fear if I mess with this I will lose all data.
As I have plenty of space that is sitting idle albeit unseen at present on the 1.5tb drive is there any way to partition this space to operate outside of the Raid array, backup an image of the system onto it. Load the OS from this new partition, delete the raid data from both drives, reformat the original drive back to a stand alone drive, install the image onto this drive. Then finally wipe the 1.5tb drive and add it back as a secondary drive resulting in a non RAID system?
Thank you in advance for your help
Pete
I appreciate the help,
I recently found myself running low on storage (300GB) and decided to buy a second HDD 1.5tb. Both are Sata. After having installed the new drive I couldn’t find the new space on the system. Having wondered about RAID previously I decided that I would look at the intel raid controllers and sure enough it recognized the drive. So I thought (being the first time I have ever messed with SATA drives instead of IDE) that I had to enter into a raid configuration to be able to access the new storage space. I spent nearly 4 hours running the raid configuration utility, restarted and found that I have absolutely no additional storage (the original 300GB total) but now the data is spread across both drives. I have figured out that I cannot revert to a non raid configuration and am wondering what I can do from here.
I have removed the power to one drive as a test and the data has definitely been split across both.
I can see unused space in Windows XP disk management utility totaling 300Gb but I fear if I mess with this I will lose all data.
As I have plenty of space that is sitting idle albeit unseen at present on the 1.5tb drive is there any way to partition this space to operate outside of the Raid array, backup an image of the system onto it. Load the OS from this new partition, delete the raid data from both drives, reformat the original drive back to a stand alone drive, install the image onto this drive. Then finally wipe the 1.5tb drive and add it back as a secondary drive resulting in a non RAID system?
Thank you in advance for your help
Pete