Member Avatar for cargenius42

I had this question before and I didn't really have good results. I have three hard drives installed on my Dell Dimension XPS Gen4. Two of them mirror each other on a Raid 0 setup, so windows sees the three hard drives as two. Now the mirrored hard drives are set as the master hard drive, while the non-Raid drive is set as the secondary. Somehow Dell did this without pins or anything......... I have no clue. Is there a way to set my raid 0 hard drives as secondary and the non-raid hard drive as the primary? Can this be done through the Raid Bios? BTW, I DON'T CARE THAT I MIGHT HAVE TO REFORMAT or might lose data, it is already backed up.

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Member Avatar for kc0arf

Hello,

A few things:

* You have a hardware RAID that is not managed by Windows. I think you knew this, but I am describing why Windows will not be able to manage this for those who are following along.

* Your RAID is RAID 0, meaning Stripe, meaning it is NOT a MIRROR, rather it is two physical disk drives that make a volume (C:, D: are volume names, not necessairly physical drive names). They are not mirrored. If one of the physical drives fails, the entire data set will be lost.

* You have SCSI drives, so there are not any Primary / Secondary drives. SCSI drives are determined by their SCSI ID number. You can use jumpers to identify that number, but it is critical that no drive have the same number. Numbers are counted in Binary with the jumpers.

* You should be able to install WIndows XP / 2000 on these sytems by booting with the CD-ROM. You may need to install a driver from a disk as a part of that setup. Then, when windows asks you what disk or partition to install on, choose the one that you need.

* If you want a RAID 1 (Mirror) you are going to need to break the raid 0 you have, and re-configure it.

Enjoy.

Christian

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