Copy raid configuration from drives to controller

I am not familiar with your RAID controller card but as long as the controller can see two additional drives, it shouldn't be difficult to add two new drives to your exisiting RAID 5 configuration.

You will probably need to reinitialize the RAID configuration for discs to copy all the parity information so you should refer to the documentation on re-initializing the RAID.

Do a ghost on the first hard drive install ghost on new hard drive and replace, I can provide more details on procedure just ask

You or your friends need to switch of raid in BIOS.
Harder way: make a floppy with raid driver (wich situated on the disk with moterboard drivers)
Pirate way: there is copies of WIndoWS with installed drivers for almost all raid controllers

> RAID

Rapid Array of Independent Disks

RAID logically combines several identical disk-drives for better performance or for better reliability.

For better performance, one RAID configuration "stripes" the data, i.e., when you write a block of data, the block is split into "stripes", and each stripe is written to a different disk-drive.
Since each stripe is smaller than the whole block, it is faster to transfer the data in "parallel".

For better reliability, another RAID configuration writes each block of data _identically_ to multiple disk-drives. Thus, if one disk-drive fails, your data still exists on the other disk-drives.
You can then replace the "bad" disk in the array, and use software to "rebuild" this "mirroring" of your data, by copying all the data from one of the "good" disks onto the "new" disk.

So, in your case, one of the disks in your array is failing. Identify it. Replace it. Rebuild your array.

The G-Raid drives use RAID-0 which splits data across both internal drives, so unfortunately the remaining drive will not be able to be used to recover any files as it will only have fragments of each file on it - the other fragments having been lost on the faulty drive. Also, you will need to contact G-Tehcnology to get a replacement drive - the drives used (from memory I think they are Hitachi) have special firmware on them and other drives will not be compatible and you'll start getting strange errors.
G-RAID drives are designed for high-throughput work like video editing, not for redundancy - they should be treated as a single drive where if the data is important you have a copy of it on another drive. Keeping data on only one drive is not a back-up, it's a problem waiting to happen. Sorry I couldn't give you any good news.

Install at least 2 more hard-drives, and configure them to use RAID.

Then, copy/move all your data-files from "My Documents" onto the new drive-set. The point here is to have "backup" for your files, not for the Operating System files (which can be re-installed from CD/DVD).

Your "programs" can stay on the "current" disk-drive.

The ThinkPad T21 is a laptop with a single drive bay.
You cannot setup this laptop with two hard drives in any RAID configuration.
You can add an external USB hard drive and copy/backup data to this hard drive.
OR
You can connect this laptop to a network and copy/backup data to another computer/server on the network.

It appears you have made an error with the RAID configuration. RAID 1 is mirroring and requires an EVEN number of drives unless one is a hot spare. Also, RAID 1 is for redundancy and is slower than a single drive or RAID 0. Verify your RAID configuration and make sure you have RAID 1 and not RAID 0 or RAID 5 which can be an even or odd number of drives.

some motherboards and processors are compatiable with certain hd's only. Here is a list:

Pentium: 2GB through 5GB
Pentium 2:5GB through 20GB
Pentium 3: 20GB through 40GB
Pentium 4: 40GB through 500GB
Pentium D: 40GB through 1TB
Celeron: 2GB through 500GB
All AMD's: 300MB to whatever.

so, that's probably your problem. I suggest

my understanding is that if you do not have other drives in a raid configuration you do not need the raid driver loaded ,have your hard drive plugged into the first sata slot, then format the hard drive ,instal o/s and all should be good.

hope this is of help

Terry