Need help with hard drive issue!

[Lothar1974]

I am trying to help a friend who had his PC built by a small computer shop, he bought all the parts and had them configure it. He wants to add another hard drive and when I went to add it they had it setup as a raid congiguration. Now I am not a newbie but not a guru. Is this common? I have never seen it and know if I was to set it up now he would lose all his info. I am going to setit up on the primary IDE channel which currently has his 2 optical drive on it. I'll switch them to the secondary IDE. Any thoughts on all this?

 

[mechBgon]

As long as you have the system continue to boot from the RAID controller, which might be "SCSI" in the mobo's boot-device menus, and don't go deleting the existing array in the RAID controller's BIOS, I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to add the new hard drive to the mobo's "native" IDE controllers as a storage drive. What motherboard is this?

 

[Lothar1974]

It's the same as mine, Asus P4S8X. He has a 20 gig maxtor and is adding a new 160 gig maxtor. I am not too familiar with raid, is raid pretty stable? I heard of alot of problems with raid. I was thinking of just switching both drives to IDE.

 

[23skidoo]

Lothar if you switch the drive from the RAID controller to the IDE channel you had better just plan on reformatting it because you won't be able to boot to it on the IDE side of things or recover any of the data on it. If he's got stuff he doesn't want to lose you're better off just adding the new big drive as a storage volume.

 

[Lothar1974]

I switched the main drive already to IDE and was able to boot with out any problems to the OS. I will be adding the second drive shortly. I read on line somewhere, (I'll try and find the link) that switching from raid over to IDE wont harm or lose anything. Anyone have any thoughts about this?