2nd Laptop Hard Drive without Raid?

Hello,

I have a Sager 5960 which has always just had one 100gb hard drive in it (at lease as long as I have owned it). I went to add a 2nd hard drive (500gb) to it tonight.

It boots and the Disk Manager recognizes the 500gb drive and says it is 465.76gb Unallocated. Okay, I go to format it using the New Volume wizard and I it forces me to 'Simple' + 'Dynamic' as the volume type. Two other choices 'Striped' and 'Spanned' are grayed out. That's fine, though. Since I don't want a raid setup if possible.

After having to choose a Simple/Dynamic volume and then assigning a drive letter and doing a quick format, the process fails after about 3 minutes with the following error message:

Logical Disk Manager
"The operation did not complete because the partition or volume is not enabled. To enable the partition or volume, restart the computer."

Of course, a restart changes nothing.

I want to know how I can just add this 500gb hard drive as a basic, primary partition for 500gb of additional drive space. Do both hard drives have to be the same size? Do I have to disable raid in the BIOS? If I have to disable RAID in the BIOS, will have to reimage or can I just boot and go?

Many thanks!

 

What tool are you using? Vista should make it easy in its drive management area to set it up. No need to use RAID.

There are a million tools/programs you can use, I just use Vista since its always there.

 

I guess I don't understand your question. I am using the Management Console in XP Pro. This is just the OS I am talking about, which is pretty much all I have ever used on any XP PC after adding a blank hard drive. Thanks!

 

I believe what you're trying to do is converting your hdd to dymanic disk.

Format your 500GB hdd back to simple disk and set it as a single partition (no RAID, JBOD, dynamic disk..etc)

 

Windows XP is not letting me do anything but choose to format and partition the disk as simple and dynamic. There is no opportunity at any stage to format the disks as basic and primary or logical. I know what to do, I just don't know why Windows XP won't let me.

Is this something I can turn off in the BIOS? I have never has Windows XP force me to format disks this way.

Thanks!

 

If you have an xp disk, pop it in your optical drive, format it using the formatter in the xp installation process.

It's probably only letting you format the disk as dynamic for your 500GB hdd because you somehow changed your disks to dynamic disk. Dynamic disk cannot be used on the system drive thus it'll remain as smple disk. Dynmaic disk however can be used on 2ndary drives.

 

Using an XP disk to format didn't work either. I finally used Acronis True Image to clone my original 100gb to the unformatted 500gb disk. I then took out the 100gb disk and booted from the 500gb disk no problem. When I then put the 100gb diskback in to format it the same thing happened. It would only let me format and create the volume as Simple/Dynamic and then it would fail before completing.

Long and short of it, I bought another identical 500gb and put that in. Then when I booted up and went into the XP management console to format this unformatted 500gb, it went off without a hitch. I was able to make it a Basic/Primary volume and format it, no problem. Must be something about this particalar laptop's disk controller that require both drives to be the same size (or identical perhaps?) even if you are NOT going to RAID them.

Thanks for the help though.

Cheers.