Dell 9150 wont recognize new Hard drive or load with out the 2 old HD's in the box.

It looks like the system is trying to set up the drive as a Raid array. What exactly did you load for drivers and drivers for harddisks are imbedded into the os and as such don't exist.

I am thinking that your bios is not set up to recognize a 1 tb hard disk. You may have to partition it into two 500 gigs for it to work properly

Hello mr2005, It appears your system was set up as a Raid1 (mirror) which means it has to hard drives of the same capacity in the Raid1 array. This would show up as the capacity of one of the 160 GB drives minus the overhead of the partitioning, formating and windows reading, and would equal the total useable size you list.

The capacity of the Western Digital drive shown in the first screen is about the correct size of a 1 TB drive that is partitioned and formated.

If you removed one of the Raid1 array drives, the system will search for it when it boots and not find it, hince the very long boot time.

The screen shows the Raid1 array in the rebuild mode.

You should re-install the drive you removed and reboot the system and see if the Raid1 array will rebuild itself.

I suspect it will. If you have the ability to add the new hard drive in the case, you could do it and it should be recogonized and be usable, since you already partitioned and formatted the drive.

A little complicated but just some thoughts.

Hope this helps.

hans

while it appears that is the case then how would he have with only two drives a C and a D drive?? this only appeard after he download some wd driver which is proably some sort of raid driver. There is no way one can have a C and D on serperate drives and be in a Raid setup

Hello Davet50, He really didn't load any WD drivers, but just ran the WD hard drive utility from the CD, as I understood it.

I may be wrong though, as I seem to be quite often, according to you.

The screens show a Raid1 with the capacity of the 160 GB drives, and also the 1 TB WD drive in port2.

He did mention he removed one drive, I thought, and installed the new WD 1 TB drive.

If he did this, he would have broken the Raid1 array, and the WD drive would show as a non-raid drive and most likely labled D:

The Raid1 drives should have been connected to port0 and port1, so the 1 TB single drive could be connected to port2.

You can have a Raid array with 2 or more drives and have another non-raid drive installed with a drive label as D:

I have this setup on 5 or 6 systems here at home.

As usual, I could be all wrong here, so if I am, I stand corrected.

My only concern is that it seems every time I try to offer any suggestions, I always get someone that sees things a little differently, and comments on why my suggestions are wrong.

Not just by you, but some of the other long time members and posters with a great post count.

I do know a lot about computers, since I have been working with them for over 28 years, but I certainly don't know everything, as some here seem to suggest they do.

I don't know anyone that knows everything about computers.

If I am suggesting incorrect information, then I beg your pardon, and will refrain from doing so in the future.

This is not the first time I have been questioned about my suggestions to help others with their Dell computer issues.

I suspect it will be the last.

I am now through here, and will let all the others that seem to know more than me, answer the questions, whether right or wrong.

And while I am at it, I still remember the request I sent to you and requested you as a Friend. I never got an answer to that request.

That tells me much about how you feel about me, as well as others.

It is entirely possible that the op does have a Raid setup but looking at the open paragraph is states a C and D drive.

I too was a bit confused by the raid screens. as it does appear to be a raid setup. up.

This confusion can only be cleared up by the OP,

No one is questioning anyones abilities I miss read and get some correcting advice all the time. So please do not take any offense. We are all here to help the posters with their issues.

Now Back to the Topic to the OP can you provide some more clarification of the orginal setup of your system as this is a bit of confusion. Normaly one does not see the raid screen unless one has a raid setup. Like Hans Has pointed out this would invole two drives and as I mentioned there is no way that one can have a raid set up with a sepreate C and D drive.

Hanspuppa  and Davet50,

thank you both for you input.

the original set up from dell was 2 hard drives, both 160.

I could always save files to either c or d drive with out issue.  In hindsight, if i saved to one, the available space was reduced by that amount. I've been told that is because it was a mirror raid set up where everything was backed up on the other hard drive. I didnt do anything to set this up, i just started using the computer when it came from dell a couple years ago and had never heard the term raid until recently when i started having issues. .

since my original post, 1 of the 2 old 160 gb hd's stopped working and i had to reinstall windows. I was able to get the the new WD hard drive to work as long as my old 160 gb hard drive is not hooked up.  The only issue now is if I boot the 1 tb wd hd, during the boot up process it looks like the pc is looking for another HD, which is fine because i orded another HD to use as a back up in the D SLOT.

So here is where i am now, if there is a raid set up on my pc, do i have to have it mirror each HD? can i just have a C  and D drive that are independent of each other?  Is this raid part of the bios or part of windows?

your thoughts and comments are appreciated.

Below is my confirguration info from dell. I'm not sure i that was what you asking for. 

mr2005

Thank you for clearing that issue up. It indeed appears that you had a raid setup. Now as to what to do I'll leave that up to Hanspuppa to guide you as I am not a fan of Raid(unless it's in a can ) so I have no experience with the setup. Now with the 1 tb and the other 160 this might get a bit interesting. I will continue to follow this as he how else do you learn right? You in good hands with Hans.

Hello mr2005, I am sorry that I cannot help you with this matter.

I do know what is going on here and do have a solution to resolve it, but if I suggest the answer, I will get some negative responses that I don't know what I am talking about.

I will let the others that know more about Raid than I, post their suggestions.

Hope this helps.

Your computer is setup with RAID 1 or disk mirroring - meaning you have two 160gb hard drives and they have the exact same data on both drives - when data is written to one, it is also written to the other.   If one drive fails, the other drive continues to work and you do not lose your data.  

Ideally, you should keep both drives in and keep RAID 1.  If there are any free SATA ports on your system board and if you have an open bay in your computer (you might have to buy a 5 1/4" to 3 1/2" adapter), put the 1tb drive in - in addition to the two other drives.  If you do no have any more sata ports, you may want to add another sata controller card.

If this is all too complicated and you just want one 160gb drive and one 1tb drive, you will have have to unmirror the two 160 drives.  In your screenshot, it shows "Press <CTRL-I> to enter Configuration Utility".  You would use this utility to do this.  Once you unmirror it, just replace the secondary 160gb drive with the 1tb drive and you should be set.  You will probably have to reformat the 1tb drive  or run the WD tools again since the raid tried to rebuild.

I'm not sure that a problem exists.  The first screen shot shows a degraded RAID, which is to be expected if you have a failing or failed drive, plus the 1 TB drive.  Note that it is listed as "Non-Member".  It is not part of the RAID, just a second drive.  I would think that if you had a C and a D drive before you installed the 1 TB, both of these logical drives would be on the RAID, which is treated as a single drive.  The second shot shows two working 160 GB drives.  The numbers listed are both Seagate numbers, not WD.  If you install the second 160 GB, and you should unplug the 1 TB while you do this, you should wind up with a RAID 1 consisting of two 160 GB drives.  Once you have the RAID working properly again you should be able to reconnect the 1 TB drive and effectively have two drives, the first being the combination of two 160 GB in the RAID, the second being the 1 TB drive.

Edited to correct confusion between the two screens.

JackShack:

I'm not sure that a problem exists.  The first screen shot shows a degraded RAID, which is to be expected if you have a failing or failed drive, plus the 1 TB drive.  Note that it is listed as "Non-Member".  It is not part of the RAID, just a second drive.  I would think that if you had a C and a D drive before you installed the 1 TB, both of these logical drives would be on the RAID, which is treated as a single drive.  The second shot shows two working 160 GB drives.  The numbers listed are both Seagate numbers, not WD.  If you install the second 160 GB, and you should unplug the 1 TB while you do this, you should wind up with a RAID 1 consisting of two 160 GB drives.  Once you have the RAID working properly again you should be able to reconnect the 1 TB drive and effectively have two drives, the first being the combination of two 160 GB in the RAID, the second being the 1 TB drive.

Thanks JackShack, for that simple explanation. I couldn't agree more.

Just to add a little more information to your very fine explanation, the reason he had the 10 minute boot time would have been caused by the Raid1 rebuilding the array after he disconnected the second drive of the array and then re-installed it. This would have been expected and would be normal.

It could take as long as an hour or more, depending on the Raid1 array capacity to rebuild a Raid1 array. He is fortunate it only took 10 minutes.

Another issue that he may or may not encounter, would be if the full 1 TB (965+/- formated) will be recogonized.

He did not provide a model number, so we could not look up the specifications of his system.

And since he didn't provide his model number, his system may not have the capacity to add a third hard drive.

To be fair with Davet50, he may have to format the 1 TB drive  into 2 or more partitions, depending on the system and the OS he is using.

Thank you for the correct information and your reply.

Actually, he is using a Dimension 9150, as stated in his subject line.  He has four SATA ports and an IDE port for the optical drives.  As the screens show, this machine is perfectly capable of using a 1 TB drive all in one piece.

JackShack:

Actually, he is using a Dimension 9150, as stated in his subject line.  He has four SATA ports and an IDE port for the optical drives.  As the screens show, this machine is perfectly capable of using a 1 TB drive all in one piece.

Thanks JackShack, for that clarification. I almost never look at the subject line. I need to be a little more careful when reading these post.

It wouldn't have made any difference in resolving his issues, or non-issue, as you pointed out.

I just took a look at the specifications on his system. He does have everything you mentioned.

The only issue that he may have is a location to install the third hard drive.

The case appears to be much like the XPS 420 where the third hard drive would need to be located in the flexbay area.

If this is the case, it would have confused him and many others as well. When I added a third hard drive, I had to do some research to get the information as to how to do this.

It is quite simple after you read how to do it, but somewhat confusing if you don't.

Thanks again for your input.

Just out of curiosity, I noticed that on the first screen the drive was listed at 935.5 gigs. Is ~65 gig loss normal for a 1tb drive?I know about the formatting an such again not having been dealing with drives this size much was just curious.

It does appear though from the first screen that the system does indeed recognize the drive and as far as i know XP has no limit on drive size so it should be good to go.