I’ve got a computer here that I’m attempting to set back up as a 64 bit OS. It’s currently running three 1TB drives in it. Two drives are running in an AMD RAID 2+0/RAID 0 configuration, while the other is a stand alone backup apparently.
What I’d like to do is to isolate the stand alone HD, an d remove it from the PC to make an external HD from to be shared between multiple computers at the shop.
So my question, is there a way to determine which drive is which inside the case without having to manually unplug each drive and boot the PC until I find it?
Its been a while since ive done ahit with uardware but if you look up either on youtube, or on the motherboard manufacturer website youll be able to find out which port is connected to the master drive, you could also go into the bootloader at start up (usually f9 or f12) and ull see the hdd that contains the os. Im not sre how you would take that and set it up as a shared drive on a local network without running server or like software. Hope that helps with something
The motherboard diagram will also tell which are raid ports, and you should be able to see them from the system startup menu as well
I looked into that just now but didn’t seem to find much.
I think right now I’m going to just do a fresh install of win 7 64bit on the system, but now I need to find out what raid drivers I need to copy to a flash drive first before wiping the system. PC does have three drives so i guess i could do raid 5 but i don’t think win 7 supports that on it’s own and would need a separate raid controller to do that instead of raid 0
i want this PC to run as fast as possible with the current hardware and want to try this myself before shuffling it off to Shady to get the work done by him 
Are both volumes accessed through the RAID controller? Or do you have a ‘pass-through’ SATA controller/connection to the one ‘standalone’ drive?
You can always go to Device Manager and switch the “View by Connection”, expand the tress and then you can see what is accessed as a RAID volume through your raid controller, versus a ‘normal’ volume through your SATA controller.
Lol, you just spoke language I don’t understand :lol
Right now I went into bios and setup the RAID configuration as specified in the motherboard manual(Gigabyte GA-MA790x- up4 soemthing or other), then went into the RAID BIOS deleted the exisiting RAID array, then created a new RAID 0 array using all three of the 1TB drives(instead of the 2 that it used to be with one floating drive)
that ultimately wiped the drive data, which is fine. I now want to install a fresh clean win7 64 bit OS, so I booted up the PC through the CD rom drive and the installation proceedure started, but now saying it’s lacking appropriate drivers(which I was aware of) I had downloaded and copied all the 64bit drivers I could find for the mother board from the website, AMD RAID controller from the website, as well as all the audio drivers and all the drivers for the ATI 4850 graphics card. I read that I need to manually install these during the OS installation or the drives won’t be recognized as the system WAS a 32 bit OS.
I’m really trying to learn this stuff as to not have to rely solely on other people to repair my PC’s if/when shit hits the fan and stuff fails. Not that I don’t mind having others do the work, I just assume others DO mind if I have to call at 3AM cause something went FUBAR.
Soooooo, I’ve been reading up on this but like any PC geek-tech site the talk on the forums is beyond my current knowledge of setting up RAID and loading a 64 bit Os onto a system that was previously 32 bit.
With Windows installed, you can click the Start Menu (or whatever it’s called now) right-click on Computer, and left-click on “Manage” - [click Yes if you’re prompted by UAC] - then select Device Manager in the left side of the window. Next, you click on the View Menu up top and change the View to “Devices by Connection” and you can expand the tree and see everything how everything is connected ‘logically’:
In your case, you’d see your SATA RAID controller and probably a logical volume and a single physical disk. However you don’t have Windows installed right now - so, this would just be for future reference.
The another ‘easy’ way to do it- if you’re good with linux- get any bootable linux iso/cd/usb-stick, and boot to a prompt and use the command - ‘lspci’. It’s great for figuring out exactly what hardware you have in your computer if you’re not sure.
I’m beyond that point now. I’ve taken these drives and wiped then and created a three disk RAID 0 array. trying to get win7 64 bit installed on that array an having boot difficulties during the installation procedure.