Got so many spare parts that I'm putting together another computer. I'm going to have to lube up the fans, though. Most of them are rattling like there's no tomorrow and it's highly annoying.
I started off with some older 20GB drives and wanted to upgrade to 200GB drives. Not a problem, I thought. I'll just use the onboard RAID controller and replace the 20GB drives one at a time with the larger drives and just mirror the data. That's what I've done before on a different motherboard (and RAID controller) before. PartitionMagic is then needed to resize the 20GB to a 200GB partition and everything is set. Heh, well mirroring the 20GB drive took a while, but mirroring the 200GB drives just took forever. Perhaps close to two hours. I loaded up PartitionMagic and the drive came up as 20GB. Great, so I figured that the RAID controller is probably functioning a bit differently and I'll just have to sever the RAID relationship, resize the single 200GB drive, and re-create a new RAID1 array — which will include another 2 hour mirror session. Great. But oh no, I cannot even delete the array without destroying the data on it. What's all that about? Yikes.
As always, the devil is in the details.