Windows XP, New Installation, Hard drive detection

[matius]

Hi:

I ran a clean install of Windows XP, now one of my drives is missing. My computer was originally setup with RAID 0...not sure how that plays into all of this.

2 physical drives: My C drive is 40G, the E drive (now missing in action), is 80G. I looked in BIOS, Device Manager and Disk Management...no 80G hard drive...but, there Z drive (RAID partition?) which was used to back up files from C and E shows up.

When I installed XP, I had a floppy with FastTrak 133 drivers (RAID for WinXP). Being the extreme light bulb I am, I thought this was how I was suppose to setup my RAID config. So, I don't see this 80G guy in bios or anywhere...is there a way to recover.

Could I have deleted everything on E? If so, how come I don't have 80G of free space...? Thanks for any advice.

M

 

[fad3toblack]

Well, though I do not know much at all about RAID, I do know that I have had a bit of trouble with getting windows to recognize my SATA drive. I had to do a couple things in device manager to get it working, though I cannot remember exactly what. Is your E drive an SATA?

 

[beerabuser30]

If your bios is not recognizing it I am not sure that this is a Windows problem.

 

[fad3toblack]

If your bios is not recognizing it I am not sure that this is a Windows problem.

OOh haha I didn't even notice that it wasn't beign recognized in the BIOS. So... Are you sure that the drive is physically hooked up right?

 

[matius]

Hey guys...

I can't really say, I know it's hooked up. BIOS shows two 40G drives, perhaps something to do with RAID 1+0 & Striping...???

Last night I installed Partition Magic to see what it could do, after reboot, my 80G drive showed back up (WTF-?). It is however in Disk Management & PM broken into two dynamic drives (see link below, referring to Disk 3 & 4). I also created almost 40G unallocated space also- I don't know how to get rid of that.

Check out the Screenshot: http://www.qwlproductions.com/issues/

* Not knowing what the hell I was doing, I made another allocation of like 37G which is now 'unallocated' space. I just want the two yellow dynamic drives back together and my C drive.

I want to use my 40G & 80G drives without RAID...too much complication for me at the moment.

Do I have to remove RAID or can I somehow use Partition Magic or something else to work out this problem? I tried to break up the RAID array in the Fastrak utility but the array would just reconfigure when it processed no array info...

Thanks for any help!

 

[beerabuser30]

If you are using partition magic you should just be able to combine them back into one partition. Everything you have says that it is a primary drive which seems kind of odd to me.

 

[Otmakus]

U might have mistakenly set ur hard disks to RAID 1, a 40 gigs disk + 80 gigs disk in RAID 1 only gives u 40 gigs space. U have to remove RAID setup via the hardware RAID controller to use all 120 gigs. Before u do that, partition magic will only recognize ur disks as 2 40 gigs HDs.

I think that's what happened in ur case. Disk 1 and Disk 2 are ur real HD 1 and HD 2 (recognized as only 40 gigs), partition magic recognized ur RAID setup as Disk 3 and Disk 4.

My advice, since u only have 120 gigs total space (and that's not much, by today's standard), don't use RAID, if u absolutely don't want to ever lose ur data in case of a HD problem, back them up often.