Does this make sense?

[Sawyer]

My new HP comp was giving me an error message that my media drive (drive v) is about to fail. I called up HP and they sent me a new hard drive which I installed but it isn't showing up in Windows (vista) but in bios I have 2 hard drives with the same serial number. I called support and they said that somehow I have a raid setup which I didn't have before and that instead of sending me the one disk they should have sent me 2. I am not sure why but my bios says I have Raid setup and I was told (by HP support) not to change it to IDE because it may wipe my hard drive.

So they claim that I now have a Raid setup and I need to install a new c drive which seems insane to me because it is working fine. I cannot see the new hard drive I installed even though Bios claims its there. Is there a Raid set up that is non mirroring, non stripping that would originally let me see 2 hard drives and now only 1 (HP support seems to claim that now it is mirroring)? The only solution they gave was for them to send me a new hard drive and for me to transfer my system to that and I just don't see why. They assured me that once I did I would see the 2 hard drives again a seperate drives not as they are now which is as Raid 1.

This seems wrong to me and a wrong assumption but I really don't know. I never set this up as a Raid system and why it would go from a 2 drive system to a 2 drive mirrored (raid 1) just seems crazy.

[RErender]

yeah sounds odd, is it plugged into the same port? I know some boards have a separate sata raid controller with it's own ports ( blue ones i think?)

[Sawyer]

It replaced the old SATA drive nothing seems different. I couldn't get the HP support guy to tell me why this would make sense. Why would I need to replace both drives if only 1 failed. It seems like that is the whole reason of 2 drives. My problem is I don't think the support guys believed me when I said the original config wasn't a mirrored Raid config. Honestly I have never set up a Raid config and I haven't even tampered with the Bios. I am pretty pissed.

[JohnVK]

Hmm... I can imagine you being pissed alright!

Is the backup battery of your mainboard failing by any chance? If the battery fails, the BIOS reverts back to default settings each time you power on the computer. Maybe the default settings in your particular BIOS are raid for one of the SATA connector sets (the one the disks are connected to)?

Just guessing here of course but it might be something worth checking out (if you didn't already of course)?

[Sawyer]

No I haven't checked the mb battery. How do I do that?

I am wondering is there a raid setting where there are 2 seperate hard drives that acta basically like they are not a raid set up?

[JohnVK]

You can check CMOS battery status from the BIOS itself. Open the page containing Health information and look for the Vbat entry (or something similar). If it's off over -0.5 volts you'd be better off replacing it. I think most mainboards have either a 3v or 3.6v battery. So the threshold kind of depends on what battery is on the mainboard.

But again, I might be completely off and this has nothing to do with it

As for raid in "not raid" config. This is usually the default setting on mainboards with SATA raid controllers. Meaning, the raid function is enabled but no RAID array has been configured. So basically they function as two independent harddisks while you can configure a RAID array using those disks. This setting is also in the BIOS.