I need help with raid.

[woolsheep7]

Hello


I recently purchased a new 2Tb seagate hard drive and installed it myself and for some reason it will not show up so that i can use it. I had 2 seperate 1TB drives installed previously and i am not sure how they are set up, the person that build my computer set them up in some kind of raid or something . I played around with a few things in the intel matrix storage console but i don't really know what im doing. I have provided a few screenshots so that may help in understanding what is going on. If you need anymore just let me know.

Thankyou

http://postimage.org/image/44wav4p6z/
http://postimage.org/image/wj1qf0cqz/
http://postimage.org/image/g9bkc422z/
http://postimage.org/gallery/7i362x8/c2210096/

 

[RealBeast]

There is no raid set up.

He put the two drives in and partitioned the first drive with the OS (C drive) at 100Gb and an 831Gb partition (D drive). The second physical drive is a single partition for the whole drive (H drive) at 931Gb.

 

[ss202sl]

^+1 No raid is set up.

Now all you need is to get the 2TB drive installed so it's usable. Does it show up in bios? In Disk management is there anything below the CD drives? It may show up here as unallocated space.

 

[woolsheep7]

i would like to know how to get the drive in a single partion like the H drive, and no there is nothing below the cd drives in disk management. what part of the bios does it show up in? it shows up when i boot the system as a 1.8TB drive.

 

[woolsheep7]

http://postimage.org/image/eaynh5kiz/

you can see from this image the 1.8Tb drive shows up when the computer boots, but what does that other one mean where it says its migrating?

 

[RealBeast]

Did you remove the H drive or is it on another controller? Does the H drive still show up in disk management at 931Gb as in your first image?

Did you try to setup an array in the bios? It looks like you are trying to migrate the drive to a RAID array: http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/cs-029274.htm

 

[woolsheep7]

The H drive still shows up in disk management as 931 Gb and no i didn't remove it. no i was trying to make the drive show up in disk management by doing something in intel matrix storage console and now the disk is migrating but im unsure what one and what migrating is?

 

[RealBeast]

Migrating generally means that the disk was RAID ready and is now trying to become part of an array. That should be a mistake as it has no other disks in the array.

The only reason that your computer has the Intel Matrix Storage Manager installed is to provide AHCI mode; it was sometimes used on older motherboards that did not support bios based AHCI.

 

[woolsheep7]

Migrating generally means that the disk was RAID ready and is now trying to become part of an array. That should be a mistake as it has no other disks in the array.

The only reason that your computer has the Intel Matrix Storage Manager installed is to provide AHCI mode; it was sometimes used on older motherboards that did not support bios based AHCI.

ahh ok, so what will happen when it is finished migrating, nothing? If so then how to i get it to show up in disk management and make it usable?

 

[woolsheep7]

also performance wise, my computer is really slow and laggy since it started migrating.

 

[woolsheep7]

The drive finished migrating but it just extended my disk 0 its still not the full 2TB though it just extended it 1 Tb i took another screenshot.

http://postimage.org/image/wgk2c6odv/

 

[RealBeast]

Since the first disk (disk 0) has somehow appended the new drive on, only half of the new drive will show up because the smaller of the drives dictates the size. The unallocated space cannot be more than the drive size that it was arrayed with.

I still have no idea how that was set up without explicit instruction given to create the array, although like you said, you were playing around with the Intel manager. Unlike before you added the 2Tb drive -- now your first drive is in RAID 0 with half of the 2Tb drive, the other half being unusable as now configured.

 

[woolsheep7]

ahh ok thankyou for clearing that up, at least i know what is going on now so is there any way to fix this or will i just have to reformat the disk 0?

 

[RealBeast]

I would do a clean re-installation with only the OS drive attached. Then attach the other two storage drives and don't install any RAID drivers, select AHCI sata mode in the bios before the new installation. You will not have that issue again.

 

[woolsheep7]

ok so will i lose all the data on the other two drives? sorry for being uneducated about this but how do i reinstall them?

 

[RealBeast]

I would move all the data off the H drive, then do a simple format, copy all data back onto the H drive. Then remove all the drives except C. Change your bios to AHCI sata mode instead of RAID and then startup with the Windows 7 installer disk in the DVD drive. Select custom install, delete and unpartition all partitions. Then just allow Windows 7 to install. Then you can re-attach the other drives. Don't put any Intel RAID drivers back on the machine.

 

[woolsheep7]

ok thankyou so much for you help one last quick question, why am i formatting the h drive?

 

[RealBeast]

To insure that it is not involved in the RAID drive issue -- you can try it without formatting that drive as it may not be. I just don't want you to be in the situation of trying to get all your files back off of H and have an issue that it is inaccessible after the other drives are reformatted, might not be a problem but I can't be sure without sitting down with your system.

 

[woolsheep7]

ok thankyou tonnes