RAID as just plain old more drives?

[Ziz]

Just built a new machine based around an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe MB. Board has SATA for the main drives, SATA RAID and IDE RAID.

New build has WD 80G SATA (NTFS, Win XP) as the main drive. I have my old WD 80G PATA drive in my old machine (ABIT BE6-II, drive is FAT32, Win 98). Even though that board has IDE RAID also, I never set up a second drive for RAID functionality.

Can I just transplant the PATA drive onto the IDE RAID on the new machine and just read it as is? It'd be easier and faster than backing up half the drive to CD's and copying it to the SATA drive. I know XP will recognize the FAT32 drive (and I can always convert it to NTFS without losing my data, right?), so my concern is that the board/XP will see the drive there and try to force me to format it, or worse, start formatting it without even asking.

[Midknyte]

xp won't ask to reformat the drive. raid has nothing to do with this question. if you put the drive on an ide channel by itself, you wouldn't be using raid mode anyway.

[Ziz]

That's what I figured. If I add another drive onto the same channel, does that automatically kick it into RAID mode? Honestly, I'd rather just have different drives for different kinds of files - graphics, audio, video, work, and so on - rather than having a bunch of drives copying themselves to each other.

[Midknyte]

no, raid is not an automatic option. you would need to create the raid array manually.

[Ziz]

Ok, one more concern - the IDE drive, being the main drive from my old machine - has Win98 and all the related startup files on it. Is that going to be a problem on bootup when I transplant it to the new machine to use as a "data only" drive? Will the new machine see the startup files and run that drive instead, or will it only look to that drive for boot if the BIOS is set to look there?

[Crashman]

Windows should set the first drive from BIOS boot order as drive C: If you want to be doubly sure XP gets installed to the correct drive, you can do your windows installation first, then add the second drive. BIOS will set the boot order.

[Ziz]

Crash - just the opposite. XP is already installed on the new SATA drive. The PATA/IDE drive is from my old machine - it has '98 installed. I want to be sure that the new machine won't see the boot files on the old drive and start up from it instead.

[Crashman]

Ah, ok, then I'd just have to repeat what I said! You want to be sure a machine already booting up Windows XP won't default to 98 when you instal the drive that has 98, well, it won't. That is, it won't so long as the drive with XP is set first in BIOS boot order.

Instal any two OS drives from any two machines into one machine and the same is true, the machine will try to boot off whichever drive BIOS says is "first".

As for XP seeing the files after boot, that doesn't hurt anything. So just make sure your BIOS boot order is correct.

[Ziz]

Ok, that's what I thought, I just wanted to be sure. Last time I built a machine was 6 years ago...the machine I'm taking that very PATA drive out of to put into this machine.