Hard drive hell

[Rawkus]

Right this has been giving me a massive headache for a while now.

I've just built a brand new system for myself using only one component from my old computer. The backup hard drive which i stored all my program installers and music/pictures etc.

Now i've done this before so i would have thought it would work fine but it won't register in the new system at all... previously the system would only notice the SSD which i've got for the OS but i then had a go at swapping out the SATA cable for the HDD previously mentioned and voila suddenly the 2 HDD's i bought for RAID appeared... but still no backup HDD.

As for my old system... now that i've removed the old HDD it doesn't recognise the 2 HDDs in RAID 0 as a legitimate boot device... neither does it see them when attempting a reinstall of the operating system...

Old system spec:
Asrock extreme3 am2+ mobo
gtx580 twin FrozrII
AMD phenom II 1090t (i think...)
2 x 4gb Ballistix 1866mhz
2 x 700gb HDD in Raid0 (Sata 2)

New system:
Sabertooth x79 Mobo
i7 3930k
16gb 1600mhz corsair vengeance
gtx 680
OCZ Vertex 4 128gb SSD
2 x WD Red 2tb in Raid0
power supply is a corsair HX1050

Any help would be much appreciated

[jim]

If your old system was using the old HDD as the boot device, then it wouldn't be able to boot from the RAID array. Sometimes the most unlikely drive can wind up being the boot drive, even if windows is installed elsewhere.

As for them not being seen during install, your installation disc would need to have the suitable RAID drivers on it in order to install to the RAID array. For Windows XP, you used to press F6 during installation and then you could add in RAID drivers from a floppy. I don't know the process for Vista/7 but I imagine it's similar. They can't put every driver on the installation disc.

[Rawkus]

I've had to put the hard drive back into the old system as i can't get it to show up in my new system...

now i've attempted a full reinstall on my old system but the bloody thing ends up with system info on it every time...

[bewarned]

I found that Windows links itself to drives, I remember trying out Windows 8 preview on a spare SSD, I removed all other drive during installation, then afterward reconnected, it somehow made a dependancy with the other drives after that. Can you not copy the programs onto any external device or purchase a cheap IDE to USB adpater just to connect it via??

[Rawkus]

I've given up tbh. every time i try to whipe the drives by formatting them in my new system windows just doesnt want anything to do with them... there seems to be a small system partition that wont let itself be removed. To be honest i was thinking about getting an external HDD anyway so got myself a 2tb bad boy and just gonn transfer it all that way. should have this problem with my new system though as i didnt install the 4tb RAID0 until i'd successfully installed windows on my SSD...

Its such a pain though. would have thought if you chose to install on a particular HDD then it would leave the other ones alone...

Thanks for all the feedback though. Looks like my buyer's gonna get another TB of space on his new PC

[Apex]

One thing you didn't say - is the hdd been picked up in the bios if so then we know it's a windows issue and not a hw issue.

To me it apears you are trying to use 2 hdds from the old machine that were in a raid array ? - the quicker way of doing this would have been to migrate all the data to a single hdd.

Drew

[Demonwar]

How are you wiping them? Were they ever encrypted?

I have found this once before, only way to wipe it out was using dban on the drive

[big_hairy_rob]

It sounds to me like your problem is from the old raid controller. Although the drive is not raided, it certainly may only work on the previous controller, but I would have expected the computer to still view it.

My advice is to purchase an external USB Hard Drive caddy (sharkoon make one I use) and attempt to transfer the data from that, before wiping the drive and attempting to integrate it into your new machine.