Will TI help with my RAID1 problem?

I am upgrading a Dell Dimension e310 that has Intels Storage Manager RAID1 with 2 80gb drives. I am using WinXP SP3. I am upgrading to 2 500gb drives. Here is what I did. I took out one 80 gb drive, and put in a 500gb. Let the RAID1 rebuild to the 500 gb drive, then removed the original 80 gb, and put just the rebuilt 500gb in to make sure it booted. It does, but the drive capacity, obviously, is the original 80. Actually, this is what I see as my partitions.
*. FAT16, 39.19MB, primary
C: NTFS 69.82, System, Primary
*. FAT32 4.64 GB Primary
* Unallocated 8.28MB, Logical

How do I utilize the rest of the space on the 500gb drive? Nothing I try shows any available space. When the computer boots, I see in the Storage Manager console the drive listed as a capactiy of 485gb. I just want to utilize all the available space. Any help would be appreciated.

bman

 

If you use different size HDD's when you create a RAID1 array the array size will be set at the size of the smallest HDD. It seems that during the rebuild the storage manager sets the size of the 500GB HDD to match the smallest HDD ie 80GB

What I would try is refitting both of the 80GB HDD's in the computer & create an image.
Then replace both 80GB HDD's with the 2 500GB HDD's, create the RAID1 array & then restore the image just created

 

Hello bman,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Products

The only addition to chris_cronin47 advice is to restore created image to newly configured RAID drive with resizing in order to occupy unallocated space. You may download free trial version of Acronis True Image Home 2009 and test it.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev