Does Installation wipe drive?

[andysr]

Right, I just plugged my current 320 GB drive into the unit (only one to hand) and turned my computer on and everything works fine. The setup went through fine and it all works as its supposed to.

The only issue is that I did have about 150GBs of content on it, and now I cant find it. There's no content showing up anywhere.

So I took out the drive, reconnected it to its old case and plugged it back into my computer via firewire and it says it cant recognise the disk and it needs initialising! This makes me think that everything that was on it is gone. Am I right, do I need to start over or is there some way to get it all back?

[andysr]

Ok, I asked a few people who know more about computers than I do (not too hard) and got an answer from them.

Its my own fault through lack of knowledge really. All settings on the thecus are RAID settings, and are completely different to general external HDD settings. As soon as I plugged it into the Thecus and accepted a RAID set up, it will have striped the drive in preparation, wiping out any data I had.
After running a drive recovery program I had I could see that there was loads of stuff still on the drive, but was advised that even if I recovered it the data had been striped over, so photos would have half missing, and songs would be corrupted etc.

So yes, totally my own fault, but thought I'd put this here just in case any other newcomers to RAID were unaware! So if you want to move anything from external HDD to a RAID HDD, make sure you copy it over, THEN plug the drive in when you're happy theres nothing else you want on it.