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    installing 2nd drive- need advice conflicting info

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by aaronw1986, Sep 24, 2011.

  1. aaronw1986

    aaronw1986 Notebook Guru

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    Hi everyone. My refurb m17x R3 came with a 256GB SSD. I now want to add a storage hard drive. In BIOS, for some reason it is setup as RAID. Can I just pop in the hard drive to use it for storage, or do I need to change to ACHI or something?

    I am most afraid of loosing my recovery partition. I don't know if the machine was supposed to come with a way to make recovery DVDs (alienrespawn?), but it didn't. All I have is the recovery partition on the SSD, so don't want to lose that. Advice is greatly appreciated.
     
    aaronw1986, Sep 24, 2011
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  2. almostinsane

    almostinsane Notebook Consultant

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    Nope, just pop it in and format it in Windows.
     
    almostinsane, Sep 24, 2011
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  3. ValkerieFire

    ValkerieFire God Follower

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    If you switch from RAID to ACHI, your original HDD will no longer work (unless you reformat it). Because it is called "RAID" we assume it means the drives will work together as one drive. In reality you can choose what function you want. When you power on your R3 you will see the RAID info screen just before the bios screen, if you hit what it says (control-I I think but I'm not sure), it will take you to a menu to choose how you want your 2nd drive used.
     
    ValkerieFire, Sep 24, 2011
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  4. aaronw1986

    aaronw1986 Notebook Guru

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    Thanks! Got it working without any problem.
     
    aaronw1986, Sep 24, 2011
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