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Ok first part.

There was a another part when the computer booted up from cold this morning.

In green something about Raid

That screenshot looks perfect. The green RAID bit was what I was asking about yesterday.

screen shot 2

The green raid didn't show on restart, but did when I shut down and booted this morning.

Drive E in the screen shot is still disconnected. What is the DVD RW drive showing

That's all perfect. You can turn off and plugin the spare 2TB drive. See what drive letter it picks up. We can change them if you want to. You can also create folders on the D drive for Documents, Pictures etc. The DVD RW looks normal.

Turning off now.

Plugged back in and booting now

Ok so it assigned it New volume E and move the DVD one to F

Incidentally I re-named the raid drive to RAID.

drop up box says.

Data on one or more volumes is protected from disk failure

In Windows 7 there are libraries, which you may have seen in Start -> Computer. There are libraries for Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos.

If you right click on a library and choose Properties you can add and remove folders to the library. You could create a folder on D for each library type, then add it to the library. Click the button "Set Save Location" to set the folder on D to be the default location where files are saved.

You can still save files to D from the Save As dialog box in the normal way if you prefer. The above steps are just to make things simpler if you're using libraries. You can read a bit more about the process here http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... -a-library

The message about protection from disk failure comes from the Intel Matrix Storage Manager utility. That's one of the reasons why I asked you to install it. If there's a disk failure it gives you a message. The other way you know if a disk fails is that after the BIOS at bootup instead of green, the disks will appear in red.

Yes, I'm familiar with that.

I have 8.32Gb of manuals I dropped in a folder temporarily while I sort them out.

If I stick them in Raid will it delete them completely as I work through them.

Drive E is just for storage now If I understand you correctly, so I could move all the manuals from C to E.

Am I thinking straight.

thescruff wrote: I have 8.32Gb of manuals I dropped in a folder temporarily while I sort them out.

If I stick them in Raid will it delete them completely as I work through them.

I don't understand what you mean. Why do you think they'll be deleted?

E is just for storage now and isn't protected by RAID as it's just a single disk. Yes, you could move the manuals to E. We can also setup the Windows Backup to backup to E if you want to.

I want to delete all the multiple copies, so they are only temporary at the moment.

Like the idea of a Windows back-up to E.

Do I need to make another start up disk now. The first one is a bit obsolete I would guess.

You can delete multiple copies if you want to. The RAID doesn't affect mulitple copies of files etc. As far as Windows is concerned it's just a normal disk with one copy of each file, if you delete a file it's gone. Does this make sense?

Just think of your D drive as a normal disk, but it has the advantage that if one of the disks fails you won't lose your data because it's mirrored onto the other drive. When a disk fails Windows won't see anything and everything will appear as normal. The Intel Matrix Storage Manager will tell you a disk has failed. You turn the computer off, pop in a new disk and carry on as before.

Yes, make another startup disk now to be on the safe side.

Yes all that make sense.

What I have is 4-5 different locations with the manuals that I have transferred to remote hard drives, so I can now open them all and cross check all the multiples, save a single copy and delete all the duplicates.

For example, I found 8 copies of the same manual yesterday.