Ok I bought a hardrive and want to add it to my dell XPS 420

[jaykedog]

I recieved a hardrive from dell the same one I had before when mine crashed, they gave me two and I was told to just keep the other. Granted, I would like to add this second one to my current system for more space and power.

I know it will be compatible because it's the exact same drive. (WD Caviar Blue
SATA Hard Drives
320 GB, SATA 3 Gb/s, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM)

Ok, So I'm very good with computers and have a decent knowledge of hardware installation.

My question is this...Once I add the second hard drive through a the sata cable and add the power cable, I know I have to go into the bios and either change something or just see if it's there. I did and now it's saying that I need to set the RAID options. I understand that this is how both drives don't compete and if I was clean installing I could just set up both and install windows and have no trouble...but I want to keep the data and windows vista already installed on the primary drive. When I go into the raid options they give me the choice to set it up but warn me that I will lose all data...is there a way to do this without losing this data?

I have Windows Vista on my primary drive already that is almost full but runs smooth.

 

[hellwig]

Your computer is trying to use both drives in a raid setup. Whatever you setup in the BIOS might be the wrong option. You might have set the SATA mode to RAID. What you really want is most likely AHCI or IDE mode. AHCI enables modern SATA features while IDE simply emulates the traditional IDE mode of the older parallel drives.

If you can switch from RAID to AHCI or IDE mode, this should hopefully tell the system you do not want to setup a RAID array. If this isn't a solution to your problem, something more might be going on.

You will need to set a priority when you are all finished (i.e. set SATA 1 as your primary, boot drive, SATA 2 as your second, storage drive, depending on where you plugged each in).

 

[jaykedog]

Ok, so if I'm starting from scratch...I haven't actually plugged in the drive. When I did that it automatically set everything and I just unplugged it and it worked normal.

So starting there from scratch. This is what I'm gathering. I turn off puter, plug in the new drive and fire it up. Press F2 and go to system options. Somehow, make sure that the SATA mode is set to ither AHCI or IDE modes. Then in the same options menu check to see which drive is which and set my main drive as primary and second as storage....is this correct? And if I do this will my computer be able to use the second drive's RAM and cache and speed power?

 

[hellwig]

Everything you said sounds good up to this point: "And if I do this will my computer be able to use the second drive's RAM and cache and speed power?".

At this point, you computer should be able to use the second harddrive for storage, yes. However, you won't see any performance increases from having a second drive, just more storage space.

Are you trying to install a RAID array? Were you perhaps hoping to use RAID0 to speed-up your computer a little bit? You cannot do this without formatting both drives at the same time (and thus, losing your data).

If you just want more storage space, follow my directions. If you were trying to do something different then I missed that and confused the point, sorry.

 

[jaykedog]

Best answer selected by jaykedog.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey