Working on brother-in-law's E520, original 160gb hard drive is nearly full, mostly with pics. Need to add another drive to store all his stuff, leaving the original for the o/s and programs.

Connected a 250gb drive, refuses to work. System is set up as RAID enabled. We do not want both drives mirrored, this is pointless and does not give extra space. If I turn off RAID, I get a message that the o/s may refuse to boot and may need reinstalling. Just what happens. Leaving RAID on allows boot, then at XP loading splash screen (the one with the scrolling blue bar under the logo) the system just sits there. Scrolling bar occasionally hesitates, just to tease, but no apparent progress.

New 250Gb drive shows in BIOS as 4.1Gb. Is it a bad drive? Or is this just as far as something has got trying to mirror the drives?

Options:

1. Reinstall o/s. Can I do this over the top of the existing, so hopefully keeping all programs and settings? If I have to start from a fresh install, I might as well put this onto the new bigger drive. What a nightmare, trying to find all the original install disks and licenses for the multitude of stuff he has on there.

2. Can I use the Dell backup program to reinstate to a new drive, or will it only work on its original drive?

3. Should i just wait for as long as it takes for Windows to load and see what I've got? Is it actually doing anything, or has it stalled? How can I tell?

4. Any other suggestions?

Thanks in anticipation.