Hey Guys I've added a second internal 500GB HDD to my Dell XPS 400. There's an expansion bay and cables all set up for it inside the box. I plugged in the SATA cable and the power cable to the SATA-2 slot and changed the BIOS to activate it. When I rebooted it found the hard drive and now it's listed in the device manager. The problem is that it's not finding it in the My Computer folder. I suspect it's been setup as a RAID drive but I just wanted it as a second hard drive to mostly store media files that are taking up too much of my original HDD. Any tips on how to get this drive to just show up as another regular hard drive? In the BIOS is says the following: RAID Autodetect/SHCI (factory default) RAID Autodetect/ATA RAID ON Combination Do I need to make a change there? Thanks!
First I would check in windows (right click my computer/manage/disk management) And see if the new HDD is partitioned/formatted and active. If not do this first and it should show up. If it doesn't try and disable RAID in the bios.
Yeah, I've been doing more research and it looks like I need to partition/format the drive. It's just going to be a data only drive so what kind of partition should I use? Primary or Extended? Is that the best option in case my original drive fails and I need to add this drive to a new PC as a way of backup?
I would go for primairy, it doesn't really matter when just using it storing data but in case your original disk fails one day, primairy partitions are bootable and you could just install the OS next to the data on the new disk. If you really want protection/backup then you probably know the answer: RAID1 mirror but you will loose the space.
So I make the whole thing primary? Or do I have a partition with say 30 GB that a future OS install can go on?
Format the whole sucker as primary and just start cramming data onto it assuming that is what you want to use it for. In the future if your main HDD fails and you want to use this second drive for the OS you can just install the OS onto it WITHOUT formatting it or repartitioning it - assuming the OS you're installing can install to the file system you're going to format it to. From the sound of it you're using some version of Windows which all support NTFS so that won't be a problem. As long as there is enough free space to install Windows come the time you want to do so it'll just overwrite the MBR at the beginning of the drive as well as dropping in a bootloader. AFAIK nothing but this variety of data can exist at the physical addresses these are normally at, meaning you shouldn't have to worry about a windows install overwriting the first few kilobytes of some movie because it now needs to use the MBR and bootloader area for something useful. I don't normally use this method and don't advocate it at all, but it is possible. I'd recommend just not being cheap when your main drive dies and just swap in a new drive completely. Cheap+computers=bad things usually happen.
Alrighty. It's formatting now. Mostly I just want more free space on my original hard drive. I'm at about 17%. I have my important stuff backed up on an external HDD. I just constantly have to delete, especially when I make videos. I'll move my important, larger files to the new internal HDD and set up the external to back it up. I'd like to keep the C: drive mostly for applications with enough space in case I need it suddenly.
