Custom Upgrade - Advanced options greyed out

foghat said:

Hi all,

I have 2 hard drives in a Raid 0 configuration. On this configuration, I have 2 partitions, C and D. C currently has Vista on it.

booted from win 7 64bit disk. Select Custom. Select advanced options and highlight the C partition. All of the advanced options are greyed out (format, delete, etc).

If I select the D partition, all the advance options are available, but obviously I don't want to install to the D drive.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to why the options are greyed out on my C partition? could it have to do with the Raid 0? It came from Dell like this.

I cannot help but wonder WHY Dell is shipping computers with RAID configured?!?!

Even with two hard drives, configured as RAID 0, the Dell web site says this:

"RAID 0 offers little protection for data because there is no redundancy (duplication) of the data, so if one drive fails the entire array will stop working." See the link for the rest of the RAID information from Dell.

You MUST use the provided RAID configuration software to modify a raid hard drive array, it can not be done with Windows Disk Management. If the RAID is part of the motherboard chipset, the BIOS must be set to enable the RAID, and to disable it.

I suggest you contact Dell Support to find out how they recommend saving your hard drive contents, disabling the RAID 0, and restoring to an non-raid hard drive.

Cheers!
Robert

well, it is hardware raid 0. Motherboard. this is an xps system, they ship it this way for increased hard drive performance.

I do have my stuff backed up, so I could remove the raid 0 and start from scratch. I'd rather not though as I lose the increased performance and am stuck with 2 - 320gig drive instead of a 640gig drive partitioned as 400 (d:) and 178 (c:)

foghat said:

well, it is hardware raid 0. Motherboard. this is an xps system, they ship it this way for increased hard drive performance.

I do have my stuff backed up, so I could remove the raid 0 and start from scratch. I'd rather not though as I lose the increased performance and am stuck with 2 - 320gig drive instead of a 640gig drive partitioned as 400 (d:) and 178 (c:)

If it is your choice to keep the raid, then I would suggest to you to go to the Dell support site and find out how Dell says to upgrade your OS on your raid array?

Cheers!
Robert

For anyone else having the issue related to the advanced drive options not showing up when installing vista or windows 7 then you can try 1 of 2 things which have solved them for me when I encountered this problem twice on two different machines....

1) go into the bios and set the date and time

2) try a different product key (yea.. lame but it actually worked)

I've only known it to happen when the installer is not really booted but running from the OS.

We only do clean installs on our shop, so the two times it happened to me was with the disc iso after the drive was erased.