Adding a 'spare' drive to Nvidia Raid Manager

[Agzee]

I am using two 250Gb SATA hard drives iin a Raid 1 mirrored array -
C partition 37.57Gb and D partition 195.31Gb - total 232.88Gb.

The array is marked bootable.

I wish to add a further new spare drive so that if one of the drives
in the array fails the spare drive will automatically be detected and
added to the array.

Or if I become aware of a faulty SATA drive I can add the spare disk
using Nvidia Raid Manager.


How should the spare drive be formatted within XP's disk management
program, I have never formatted a hard drive before hence my question.

When using the wizard in Disk Management should I select 'primary' and
then just opt to format the whole disk?

Agzee

 

[DL]

You would have to read the raid instructions specific to Nvidea.
Usually there is no need to format a hot swap drive, and if the drive is
visible in Disk Managment its not attached to the raid set as a hot swap.

 

[Agzee]

Thank you for the advice.

After checking the FAQ on Nvidia's website I found a link to the
"Mediashield" manual which gives a detailed description of the raid
functions and settings.

I will be purchasing the additional drive in a day or so and will
check once I fit it if it does show up in Disk Management or only in
the Nvidia Raid Manager program.

Cheers Agzee

 

[Agzee]

Just an addition to my previous post.

After reading the Nvidia manual for MediaShield (Raid Manager) it
determines that I have at present a two-disk Raid 1 mirrored array, if
I add a further disk this will show as a 'free' disk.

This 'free' disk has to be formatted in Windows XP disk management
according to the information in the MediaShield manual.

What settings should I choose to just format the whole disk?

I am confused by the terms Primary partition, Extended partition and
Logical drive.

Once this free disk is formatted I can manually remove the ailing disk
I have in the array at present and then add the new disk to the array
which will then start rebuilding.

Agzee

 

[Agzee]

After replacing my Raid 1 array hard drives today I now understand
your remarks about there being no need to format the new drives, they
were not visible in Disk Management only in Nvidia Raid Manager.

I removed the ailing disk installed the new Samsung disk and Raid
Manager detected it and automatically started rebuilding the array
once this completed I removed the second old disk to see whether the
new Samsung would load Windows which it did.

Raid Manager naturally showed a 'degraded array' due to there only
being the one disk available, then added the second Samsung disk and
once again the array commenced rebuilding, my system is now back to
normal.

Once again thank you for your advice.

Cheers - Agzee