Hard drive issues

[Chris_Hebden]

Hi all. With my system I should have 500gb of hardrive space. This used to show as one 500gb hard drive within my computer. One hard drive failed just after we got the PC so it was replaced. Since the we have had 2 hard drives shown in my computer, C: Vista and New Volume D: which had our Vista boot information on it.

I turned the computer on today after it being off for 5ish days and it came up with Hard drive D "error booting" FAILED a black screen came up telling me to turn this onto NON-RAID! It did warn me that this would wipe what ever was on this hardrive. I didnt seem to have a choice, if i didnt change the settings it wouldnt load. So i did and now, within my computer, its shows as a new volume but with no boot software installed?!

Have i ballsed up!!?!?!

Also, looking in the BIOS I have IDE channel 2 (Master) in use and IDE channel 3 (Master) in use.

Is there anyway of having both hardrives act as one, like it was from factory?

Many thanks, Chris (ps sorry for the essay but i havent a clue whats going on )

 

[Chris_Hebden]

OK, after a bit of research i found out how to create a Vista bootable Flash Memory Drive so presumed that was what the secondry hard drive was. It told me to type in this CMD.exe and then in command prompt type in xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\ (changing the letters to suite my drive letters) which I did. I now seem to have many more folders in there, does this seem right?

 

[Chris_Hebden]

Can any one help on either problem? Loosing Vista boot information (did i do it right)? If there is a way to "link" hardrives together to show one 500gb hardrive and not 2 250gb?

Chris