Qosmio G20 - Unable to initialize 320GB drive - JBOD to 1RAID-0

Question

Hello, fellow Toshiba users,
at first I apologize if this question has already been answered, but I failed to find existing answers to my problem.
A colleague of mine has a Toshiba Qosmio G20 with two 80 GB disk drives. Large 17 inch "surf-board-sized" laptops aren't my cup of tea, but the Qosmio served him pretty well.
We tried to upgrade both aging hard drives in his laptop. Having considerable experience in replacing the laptop drives I didn't expect any particular surprises, but I was wrong.
We tried to replace the original drives
bay 1: 80 GB Fujitsu drive, system
bay 2: 80 GB Fujitsu drive, data, RAID off
with the new ones
bay 1: 320 GB WD Scorpio drive
bay 2: 320 GB WD Scorpio drive.
The G20 BIOS is v1.30, the latest version. It recognizes the new drives' - but marking one of the new drives as 1RAID-0 fails. After trying to "initialize" the 320GB drive in bay 1 as 1RAID-0, on the third page of G20's BIOS, there is some disk activity, however the drive remains in JBOD mode.
Being unable to mark the 320 GB drive as 1RAID-0, I am unable to use the 320GB drive as a system drive.
If the original system drive is cloned to a new 320GB drive it fails to boot. Booting XP *starts* but subsequently fails with STOP 0x7B - in other words, the infamous INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE blue screen when Toshiba RAID driver is loaded during Windows bootup.
Installing windows from plain-vanilla CD, of course with slipstreamed Toshiba driver, remains impossible. The Windows setup only "sees" the drive in bay 2.
When the system drive is put in secondary bay and G20 is booted from it, Windows XP starts successfully. However, the drive in bay 1 is inaccesible from Windows, it remains offline in Toshiba's RAID console. So booting from drive in bay 2 isn't an option, too.
A similar problem where the owner failed to install a 200GB system drive is described here
Link: http://tinyurl.com/38wokw
That owner, however succeeded in installing a 100GB drive and we resorted to 80GB drive as a system drive, and upgrading only the drive in bay 2 to 320 GB.
I understand what happens when the drive is "initialized" in BIOS. Toshiba's BIOS only marks the drive as 1RAID-0 and it fails on 320GB drive. I'll refrain from stating my opinion on such practice.
My question is - if it is possible, how to *manually* mark the 320 GB drive as 1RAID-0?
Using a hex editor, dd or something similar is no problem. A partial answer would also be to know the largest drive size that *can* be successfully marked as 1RAID-0 in G20's BIOS.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi
Im not 100% sure what could be wrong by I presume the 320GB HDD size could be too large!
How about the 100GB or 120GB HDDs?
I think you should test it because usually the most of the BIOS supports an HDD size limitation and therefore not all sizes are supported.
But note; using the 1RAID-0 (striping) configuration, the size seen by the OS is twice that if the smaller of the two HDD units in the RAID configuration. Using the RAID-0 all data on both disks will be lost, even if only one of the two disks drive fails.