Hi All,

I have a Dell XPS 420 which was bought in April....what I want to be able to do is install an additional 300gb sata drive for storage.

The current setup though is two 320GB Satas in RAID0 so show as a single 596GB HDD. This is fine...however if I try to add an additional drive the BIOS/and Vista does not see it.

According to the board, there are 5 sata ports. 0-4. Sata0 and Sata1 are taken up by the two raid drives and Sata2 by the DVD. Leaving Sata3 and 4 free.

If you go into the BIOS its shows Sata0,1 and 2 as enabled and 3 and 4 disabled. If I enable 3 it then posts a message on boot of no SATA drive found on port 3 (I have tried 4 also).

There is another setting in the BIOS that asks about whether RAID should be on or AutoDetect (ATA, if named drives use RAID) thingy. This is currently set to RAID ON. I did look to change this but go a message about it will change the drive labels and could require reinstall (eek)

Have I missed something obvious or is there a reason why I can't add a single HDD to the existing drives?

Someone I know said I needed to install a BIOS update to get this working.  If so, would it mean I need to reinstall my RAID and everything else?

Any help gratefully recieved.

Thanks

Andy

Edit: The two RAID drives in are Samsung and the drive I am trying to put is a DiamondMax10 Maxtor 300GB. I have also tried with a 250GB DiamondMax21 and same problem.