Adding an extra nonraid Hard Disk to a Raid pc

[domy85]

Ok, This is probably a dumb question and I should know this, but Im getting rid of my external Hard drive<---slow and putting in a 700gb internal instead. I have 2 150gb western digital hard drives in a Raid 0. In the bios settings I have to have raid selected in order for my main OS to work, but the extra nonraid hard drive wont show up because its selecting all 3 for a raid even though under raid configuration settings it detects the new nonraid hard drive and says its "nonraid" and because of that it wont show in windows. I need to set this hard drive to a nonraid and my other 2 to keep in a raid on this controler, but i cannot see how i do this. Please help :D

System:
Asus Maximus Formula SE
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650
4GB Mushkin XP2-9200
Thermaltake Tough Power 700watt PSU

[Paul Komski]

I can't get into the manual for the board so have no idea what the BIOS options are. I would have thought there must be a way to remove it from the RAID area and configure it as a "standalone".

SATA or PATA drives by the way? If SATA then try and see if there is a way of using IDE emulation.

I have know it happen for a single drive to need to be added as a single drive RAID (if that makes any sense at all) before the system would recognise it. This was in the era when SATAs were first coming out and were in effect treated as SCSI emulated drives.

[domy85]

They are sata's. When i get off of work, ill will set it back to Enhanced IDE mode, restart, then go back into bios and it will show the hard disks again. When Raid is selected it doesnt show the empty or taken IDE/sata hard disks or cd rom drives. In the Raid configuration mode "CTRL+ C or I" it will only give me an option to remove the raid, not the extra hard drive so its not making it in a raid, but its showing up in the config mode because in the bios its set to raid. You would think there would be an option to select which drives you wanted as a raid/IDE in the "bios" other than only the raid configuration mode...

[Paul Komski]

Nothing to lose by attempting to add it to a new array as a single drive array. Either the firmware will allow it or not. I'm a bit scared about advising so blind in this area when you have a functional RAID 0 array in situ and when it is so easy to break a RAID 0.

CTRL+ C or I" it will only give me an option to remove the raid,Which array is it referring to or is it suggesting to remove all RAID from the system.

[domy85]

It will only remove the whole raid. Oh I just remembered that I tried that creating a new raid and it said not enough space, so it wont let me choose the new hard drive, it goes directly to the already preconfigured disks on the raid 0. It gave me 4 options to choose from, there was delete raid, create new raid, exit, and something else. I just reinstalled vista ultimate 64bit last night cause somehow anything i would plug into my usb ports would require a driver and wouldnt even work with ones i had from a cd or hardware website and this happened out of nowhere. Couldnt use jack, so i tried restoring back to a date and it worked once, but i unplugged my mouse and keyboard and plugged it back in and it blue screened and started all over again lol, i was laughing cause it was so stupid, so i did a clean install. Nothin on there but updates and sp1, so if i have to reinstall to configure this drive it wouldnt be a problem. I just wouldnt see see why I would have to delete the raid, it wouldnt make sense to me because it gives one option in the bios to either make them all raid or all IDE. Plus the raid configuration wouldnt let me even select this new hard disk to make it a array now so why would it any other time.

I was just thinking, When i deleted the partition and reinstalled the OS, i didnt touch the raid configuration and reinstalled vista and didnt even have to load the raid drivers and it detected the drives in a raid automatically. Does vista have them built in or is it recommend to use the mobo ones?

[Paul Komski]

If you don't mind losing everything then now is the time to experiment and not at some later stage when data loss might be important. You could try deleting the current array or of adding a new one to have more than one array in the system at once. Or remove all RAID and setup a singleton first. Then try enabling RAID and adding your current pair of drives to it.

[domy85]

Hm so your saying by deleting the partition, then deleting the array might let me create 2 different arrays since its maybe at the same time. If not i think i have limitations on this controller. My next step would probably be a seperate pci sata controller card if they make them, or controll the new hard disk through disk manager in windows, but im not sure it would show up in the manager because it wont even show up in windows. But before that, i will call asus tech, but from what i heard and experienced, i hope i get someone knowledgable for this type of problem :eek:

[domy85]

Heres how I did this:

1. It was ok that it was set as a raid, the raid configuration still detected it as a nonraid disk.
2. Management console/computer management
3. Select Disk management
4. The hard drive will show up
5. Right click it to make it a volume
6. Leave everything defaulted as you go through the steps except make sure you check "quick format".
7. Takes a second and boom its available

Thanks for all your help