Hard Drive Issue

When I bought my M17x, I got 2 hard drives and the space from both were combied as the C drive. After I updated the BIOS, my computer ouldn't start so I reinstalled windows. Now the drives show up seperate.

Does anyone here know how I can get them as one drive again? I would prefer not to use 3rd party software.

Thanks

 

I believe it's called extending the volume. You can try looking it up on youtube. You'll need to make sure there isn't anything on the second drive, however.

 

Sounds like you have 1 hard drive with multiple partitions. 2 physical drives would not show as one unless you were running both drives in RAID.

If in fact you have 2 physical drives and had RAID set up at the factory, try changing the BIOS back to RAID and configure the drives. Once done, reinstall windows. If you need assistance with configuring the system for RAID, do a forum search - I know there were a couple of GUIDES done for this.

 

I don't know if it's the same as desktop motherboards, but you generally can hit CTRL+I during bootup and it should allow you to create a raid 0 array. That is what I assumed happened.

You will need to do it again, label your array, and reformat. Basically, you just formatted your OS onto one drive, and left the other drive as a separate drive.

 

Thank you all for your help. It got me in the right direction.

 

On an alienware m17x pressing F2 during boot will get you to the Bios settings.
Correcet me if I'm wrong.

If you buy a refurbished machine as my company has in the past Dell will not set it up in raid. I've seen this time and time again. They set it up for two independent disks not raided. Something to do with the cloning process of the drives. (Easier for the support line folks to do possibly saving them a minute or two per machine. Just think what that would add up to in wages.)