computer problem, can't remove disc drive

Coveredinbees!!!!

I have a problem with my PC it seems like one of the drives is on it's last legs and I want to remove it. I have 2 ide drives and 2 SATA drives on a plug in raid card. The problem is the OS is installed on the raid drive and when I takeout the drive the pc can no longer see the OS. I put the drive back and the system will boot up. I have a version still of xp on the other ide drive and I can still boot from that.

m5rcc

Well that's the problem with RAID: it's a mirror. Depending on which raid, an identical blank hard drive could be fine to install and RAID will replicate the mirror.

Notmyrealname

m5rcc wrote: »

Well that's the problem with RAID: it's a mirror.

Or striped in their case it would seem. If it was mirrored it would boot from the other drive that was an identical copy.

Coveredinbees!!!!

it's one of the ide drives I want to take out not one of the sata ones

m5rcc

RAID must be reliant on IDEs being present I can only assume.

Why not backup everything, as you'll need to if it's on its last legs, get a new 1TB+ SATA and reinstall fresh Windows?

InsideInsurance

Coveredinbees!!!! wrote: »

The problem is the OS is installed on the raid drive and when I takeout the drive the pc can no longer see the OS.

I think you are a little unclear here.... from what you are saying, you have a HD with OS installed, when you take out that HD the OS is not longer there... not really surprising! I suspect that isnt what you actually mean.

So you have 4 HDs installed.

A - IDE - Failing
B - IDE - Fine
C - SATA - Fine
D - SATA - Fine

What type of array do you have (0? 1? 5? X?) and which drives are being used for what in that array?

Coveredinbees!!!!

A - IDE - Fine - has xp on
B - IDE - Sick
C - SATA - Fine has xp on but won't boot with out B installed
D - SATA - Fine

hope that makes it clearer. If I boot from A (I have xp boot menu) with B removed I can still see all the files on C and D. I think it's raid 0 ie no mirroring. I had to get a raid card as I bought drives that were SATA II but my motherboard would only support SATA and the drives were not backwardly compatible.

Avoriaz

Can you remove the sick disk, buy a suitable replacement, clone the sick disk on another PC belonging to a friend or family member and install the new cloned disk in your own PC?

Coveredinbees!!!!

I have substituted the drive for another one (6.5 gig, remember when that was big?) and improved the air flow and it seems to have sorted out the problem but I still don't know why I can't take it out completely.