A few months back I purchased a new XPS 410 that cam pre-configured as RAID 1 with twin 250GB drives. 

 

Board Specs: Intel G965 with Intel 82801HR RAID controller

 

Needing faster performace, I used the Intel Matrix Storage Manager to migrate the drives from RAID 1 to RAID 0. 

 

As expected, the size of the volume did not change with the conversion from RAID 1 to RAID 0.  So, I tried to increase its size of the partition using Partition Magic 8 as I have done before with no success.  PM8 does not even see the empty 232 GB in the RAID 0 array.

 

Q1: How can I increase the size of the partition to take advantage of the entire space available?

 

Q2: If I am able to increase the volume to the maximum size avaiable in the array, can I then add a thrid 250 GB HD to convert to RAID 5? Currently the Intel utility options to modify any properties of the current volume such as migrating to RAID 5 are all "greyed out" except the option to change the volume name.

 

Thanks.