Converting a single hard drive with a RAID controller to IDE

[Laddad]

I have a three year old HP Pavillion Elite e9120 running Windows Vista that has a solitary hard drive appearently controlled by the motherboard's RAID controller. The hard drive is now full and I want to add another hard drive and make it a data drive. I went into the BIOS and noted the "default" was RAID. For my purposes I want it controlled by the standard motherboard IDE controller. If I change the BIOS to IDE control the disk is not read. How do I fix this mess! I just don't understand why HP would make the default controller RAID when there was only one drive!

 

[dingo07]

You don't have to change the config from RAID to IDE - leave it the way it is, and install the second drive. Just because it's set to RAID does not mean you have RAID configured for any drives, however, it's set to give u the option should u want to.

 

[inzone]

If you change the sata controller mode after Windows is loaded the drive will not be read and the computer will not boot into Windows. There is no need to change the sata controller to IDE or AHCI since the hard drives will continue to work with it set to raid.
If you want to change it for some reason there is a registry hack that you can do that will allow the sata controller mode to be changed but as with any registry change there is risk involved.
I would just leave it alone and if you decide to change hard drives completely then you can change it.