Missing Hard Drives

I have three hard drives on a Windows XP professional operating system. One of the drives (C) is for the operating system and programs. I have two SATA drives which were set up as a RAID Array for data storage which was designated as drive (E). I am not sure what happened, but drive (E) no longer shows up in windows explorer. The drives that show up in the device manager are first the one that is used for the operating system and programs and the other one is Silion image.... which I suppose is the two SATA drives. I have tried deleting the RAID Array and recreating the Array, but I get the message "not enough single drives to create an Array. Is it possible that one of the SATA drives has crashed? How can I determine if this is the case?

One of the SATA drives was bad and has been replaced with a new SATA drive. In disk management SATA drives shows to be unallocated. What do I need to do in order to name the SATA drives E?
Any help would be appreciated.

Unallocated usually means it's not partitioned. Create the partition(s) you want on the hard disk, them format same with the file system of your choice. (FAT32, NTFS, etc) Once this is performed, the partition(s) will show up as (logical) drives. You can then rename the drives (other than the O/S drive) to any available letters you want. If E is already "taken" on a drive, you can rename that to another letter, then use E on the partition/drive you want E assigned to.

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Thanks Dan....
Now my ignorance is going to be reveled. In as much as the two SATA drives(200GB each) are going to be used for editing video, what do you recommend that the size of the partitions be and how do I setup the partitions?
Thanks for the advice.

I found "How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP" but not sure if I should use (1) Primary Partition, (2) Extended Partition, or (3) Logical Drive?

Thanks

As for partition sizes, I'd take the average size of the video files which will reside on the partition, times that by x files on the partition, and add 15% for free space (for disk maintenance (defrag etc)). Just remember that the larger the partition, the longer it takes to defrag, search, etc, and if it ever "crashes", the more you can potentially loose.

Use Primary. Assign the size you want (MB or GB - 1000MB = 1 GB) to the primary and create it. (You can create up to 4 primary's on a disk.) The O/S will assign the next available drive letter to each. If you want to set up more than 4 partitions on one hard disk, then create an Extended partition (using the entire remaining free space on the disk), then create Logical drives within that Extended partiton.

Once you've created your partitions, then format them with the file system of your choice (FAT32 or NTFS) so they are ready to receive data.

If you ever add another hard disk and create primary partitions on it, the drive letters for the logical drives in the extended partition of your previous disk will be bumped down the list of letters. The primary partition letters will remain the same. ie; Primary partitions take precedence regarding drive letters.

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It's a good day when you learn something
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Location: Alberta, CanadaD-A-L Hardware Scan

Thanks.... I appreciate your help. I hope that you have a Merry Christmas..
David

Your welcome, and Merry Christmas.

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It's a good day when you learn something
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Location: Alberta, CanadaD-A-L Hardware Scan