Few Questions About Disk Management

I have a few questions; all dealing with disk management. I have a photo of my disk management screen below.

1. I recently did a rebuild of my Aurora R3. It has a 1TB hard drive in RAID0. There is a small partition there of about 10G left that I want to include into my primary hard drive. It's not the reserved space that I have grown used to Windows making over the eyars I have used them. I believe that this was the Dell partition that I removed when I did my rebuild.

2. I have an external hard drive that plugs in. Since I got my new PC I cannot boot with it plugged in. I have to unplug it and after I log in I can reattach it. Is there any fix for this? It worked in Windows 7 prior to my new rig.

3. The external hard drive has what appears to be a CD-ROM drive when it is hooked up. I see an E: (CD-Rom) and and F: (the actual storage space) Is there a way to get rid of the "E:" and just have it be one hard drive?

Thanks for any help or insight into these items.

Uncheck use autoplay for all media and devices in autoplay in control panel. See if that works.

See if Dell Diagnostics will run from boot using the hotkey given on BIOS splash screen. If not you can also delete the OEM partition.

I would use free Partition Wizard bootable CD to delete OEM if desired, then rightclick Resize C into the space to the left by grabbing and dragging the left border on popup box., click OK then Apply. You may need to Rebuild MBR from the Disk tab or run Startup Repair from DVD Repair console or System Repair Disk since resizing on the boot sector can lose bootability.

May I ask why you are using RAID0? Win7 doesn't much like RAID.

AddRAM: It didn't work on booting with the external hard drive plugged in. I read on other posts at this site that it is a known Microsoft bug. I'm open to other ideas and thank you for replying.

gregrocker: I have downloaded and burned the Partition Wizard iso . Once booting into it, it saw the two hard drives as separate and not as a RAID0. I got a little nervous about tweaking that and backed out. I don't mind rebuilding; just a bit worried. To answer your question, I have a RAID0 because that's how Alienware built the system. Do you and others recommend busting up that RAID and going with 2 hard drives instead? If so, how would I do that? The RAID information shows in the "black boot screen" area and when I get into Windows it looks like one big hard drive minus the 10G unallocated partition.

If you only have two 1tb HD's then it looks like you have already busted the RAID, which is a good thing as far as Win7 is concerned.

See if you can browse into F in explorer to see if it's an empty storage HD, which it appears it was already labeled. Are you even sure you had RAID to begin with - not if you had only two 1tb HD's and one had already been labeled storage?

You can also check the SATA controller setting in BIOS setup. However sometimes RAID is a generic SATA setting and not spanned. If there remains any uncertainty, check the installed HD's in BIOS setup.

You're awesome, gregrocker. Thanks for sticking with me on this. I actually don't have two 1TB drives. The 2 drives you see are the main hard drive (2 500M drives made into 1TB RAID0) and the external USB hard drive. The RAID0 is still in play.

Problem basically solved. I dropped the RAID and reinstalled Windows. Now I have two 500G hard drives. I still can't boot with the USB hard drive plugged in though.

This normally means that the external has boot sector code which is interfering. Since screenshot doesn't include the drive listings we can't see how much data you have on the external but if you can move it off then I would wipe the external with Diskpart Clean Command, repartition and replace the data.

OK, moved the data, did the clean as the instructions says; but, it still will not reboot when the external hard drive is plugged in. See the image below:

• Disk 2 (EXSTORE G: ) is the free space that I did the clean on. I can read and write to it with no problem
• CD-ROM 1 (HP Launcher F: ) is another "partition" that I cannot see to clean. It's always there yet it's not accessible and I think that this is my culprit. This drive is actually part of the same external hard drive that EXSTORE G: shares.

I did disable all boot devices in the BIOS except for the primary drive (Disk 0 OS) in spot #1 and CD-ROM 0 in spot #2.

When you google HP launcher you find a lot of angry customers who want the virtual CD drive software off of their external. However since it is an added chip it cannot be wiped or formatted.

Try going to Device Manager to look under CD-ROM drives for HP Virtual drive, Disable it.

Manyadvanced users who didn't want the virtual drive gave up and sold or returned the HD.