On Jan 17, 10:13 am, woods...@googlemail.com wrote:
> I had hoped Partition Magic would be more intelligent and be able to
> recognise and manipulate the Intel RAID layer, but unfortunately it
> sees it the same way as Windows Disk Manager, just as a single
> "virtual" disk.


So are you saying that after replacing the original 150G disks with two
new 250G disks that Windows still sees it as a disk of total physical
size of only 150G? That's as opposed to a disk of physical 250G with
150G partitioned, and 100G unpartitioned? I'd say then it's time to
break the mirror. I'd say physically unplug one of the mirrors, to
remove it from view, and to safeguard its data. Then boot into the
remaining mirror, destroy its partition, remove it from Intel RAID
control, and then put it back into Intel RAID control as a brand new
RAID set, you should now see an unformatted 250G virtual disk. Then
plug the old mirror back in, you should now see one 150G formatted and
one 250G unformatted disk. I don't know what Partition Magic can do,
but if it's similar to BootItNG, then you should be able to copy the
150G partition verbatim over to the 250G unformatted disk; that'll give
you a 150G partitioned and 100G unpartitioned space on the 250G disk.
You can then use PM/BING to expand the partition out to the whole disk.
Unplug the 250G partitioned disk, to safeguard its data. Now destroy
the RAID info on the 150G virtual disk just like before, and then
re-enable RAID on it; you should now have a second 250G virtual disk
completely unpartitioned. Enable it as the mirror of the first 250G
virtual disk, and let Intel RAID resync the mirror.

Second, one thing you should really consider is whether it's worthwhile
keeping it under Intel RAID control any further. I know it helped out
during your last set of disk failures, but what if your next set of
failures is your motherboard? If you replace your motherboard, you'll
have to find the exact same motherboard again, in order to let Intel
RAID work on it. If you get another motherboard with onboard RAID, and
it's not Intel RAID, then they won't be compatible. Besides, Intel RAID
does funky things with the disks that ends up hiding them from the OS.
You can't receive SMART info off of these disks if they are hidden from
the OS, which would let you know ahead of time that a disk is failing.

Yousuf Khan