4 Hard drives and no idea

RoboCod

RoboCod

RoboCod

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Joined
19 Jun 2004
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Hi,

I have aquired 3 new hard drives recently because it became apparent to me that I need to replace the old Maxtor 80gb. The Maxtor seems to have some bad sectors, i.e. when I defrag there is a big red chunk that it cannot shift, its also about 5 - 6 years old and had some heavy use anyhow. I have since bought a pair of WD Raptor drives (36gb each) and a WD 250gb for storage.

I am under the belief that installing windows on the Raptor shall mean the OS runs much quicker so I intend to install XP ONLY on here. Should I just sell one of the Raptors then? 36gb would be plenty for XP + programs. Is it possible to clone my IDE installation of XP to SATA? Or would it be advisable to just do a fresh install? I was also wondering how some of you partitioned your storage drives? Im thinking a setup as follows...

#1 Raptor 36gb - XP

#2 WD 250gb partitioned as:

100gb - music
75gb - movies
75gb - games

#3 Maxtor 80gb - spare storage, documents perhaps.

Thanks in advance

CP
 
I have just installed one of the Raptors and although it shows up in the Bios I cant seem to see it in My computer (?) Never used Sats before you see :rolleyes:

My thoughts were that I could sell one of the Raptors and just keep one. Ive never Raided before - how easy/hard is this?

Apologies for all the questions and thankyou's for all the sound advice :)
 
Ok, Ive put the Drives into my computer, connected the Sata lead and the power pins, booted up the computer using the XP disk and tried Formatting both drives. Here I hit a problem. 1 drive fully formats 100% but I am then presented with an error message saying windows cannot be installed, the disc is either damged or not setup correctly. The other reaches 46% and just hangs (tried this 3 times now). I have checked the Bios settings and enabled Sata, I cant really think of anything else I should do, I dont need to change any jumpers do I ? At present there are no jumpers on either drive.

I should inform you that I purchased the drives second hand so they were likely to be used in a raid array previously. Would this mean I have to install them using F6 in the XP installation and using a floppy with the sata drivers on them?

Thanks for assisting

CP (NOOOOOB!)
 
Ok Ive used the WD diagnostic program to copy my installation of windows onto the raptor. This works fine, however, am I utilising the drive to its full potential or is the copy limiting it in any way? Should I just risk formatting it now to see if it works this time with the XP disc?
 
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