[travelman007]

My computer running XP Home has recently been having problems with one or both of my Maxtor SATA drives going bad on me. It constantly boots up and does a scan disk. I had two 160 Gig Maxtor SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration (Striped). So, I backed up "Almost" everything onto another pc on my home network and then bought two new Seagate drives which are 7200rpm SATA baracuda 400 Gig dirves.
I have pulled the old drives out and put the new drives in and loaded up the operating system, etc, etc.

My question now is.......I forgot to get my outlook mail files off of the old drives, so can I temporarily take out the new drives and put the old drives back in long enough for me to pull off the outlook files that I need and then put my new drives back in? The hardware on my system as far as everything else is the same as far as printers, scanners, etc. Will this cause any problems in the bios, or will it break my raid configuration.
It was an all day affair to get these new drives completely up and running and I wouldn't want to loose the work that I have done so far. Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me on this.

Ross

Edited by travelman007, 04 September 2006 - 07:10 AM.

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You need to set the two drives up in the same way as they were before to recreate the RAID setup, otherwise it won't be able to read anything.

[Neil Jones]

You need to set the two drives up in the same way as they were before to recreate the RAID setup, otherwise it won't be able to read anything.

[travelman007]

Neil,

Thanks for the reply. Do you mean that I would have to step through the initial raid confiuration the same way as I did the first time I set the original drives up? And then the drives should work ok? Then just do the same thing with the newer drives after taking out the old ones to replacing them with the new ones again?
I guess the disks already contain the drivers for the raid in order for the OS to understand them.Where is the partition information stored? Is this stored in the raid bios, or on the hard disk? I am obviously a bit confused about the specifics.

I also have two more sata ports that I believe are on a different type of raid controller - onboard as well.
I believe it is a southbridge. Would this help me out at all?

Regards,
Ross

[Neil Jones]

Don't set the RAID up again, it will wipe the drives.

What I meant was plug the units into the same SATA ports they were before. Then tell the computer not to boot off the RAID, but rather off your new drive. This is done by an option in BIOS.

[travelman007]

Neil,

Thank you! I did it and it worked. I appreciate your reply.

Regards,
Ross