OK, I basically punted and installed the two new 750GB drives on a second controller, an old Adaptec PCI add-in SATA RAID card that recognized the two new drives immediately, instead of banging my head for days trying to get the on-board controller to work with the new drives. Everything works now, with the system partitions on the old drives/old on-board controller.
Interestingly, the OS-based RAID utility for the on-board controller(which is actually very thin on functionality) did recognize the 750GB drive when I hot-swapped it, and built the set onto it automatically. The controller's BIOS POST hung as before on a cold boot thereafter, however.
What I didn't try was updating the on-board controller's BIOS, which was outdated. Curiously, there wasn't a floppy-based flash utility and this could only be accomplished via the driver-based configuration utility under Device Manager. This presented two problems. First, the buttons and fields were greyed out and non-functional and the driver-based utility didn't appear to recognize the chip. Second, and even if this did work, the available BIOS upgrades were advertised in the associated Readme.txt files as being either for add-in cards only, or in development/experimental for on-board chips. Consequently, I was reluctant to flash the controller's BIOS with something unworkable and not be able to roll back.
Lessons learned:
- As with many backup utilities, many RAID 1 implementations neglect restore functionality.
- Adaptec's hardware appears far more robust and it has far more robust BIOS- and OS-based RAID utilities. Even the BIOS-based utility permitted cold-swapping a new drive into a RAID 1 (mirrored) set and rebuilding. Everything worked as expected.
