Dynamic Disks in Windows XP Pro...

[TheCake]

Interesting question for you fellow techies.

If you had a Windows XP Pro machine with say 4 x 300GB hard drives in the following format..

C: 300GB
D: 300GB
E: 300GB
F: 300GB

Is it possible to enable dynamic disks on 3 drives so that in effect you have a C: drive with 300GB space and a D: drive with 900GB despite computer management saying they are in fairness 4 seperate drives?

Would this in theory work? anyone have any screenshots of how they've accomplished something like this without the need for SCSI disks/card with an array.

Thanks.

 

[bmh.01]

Yep, cos i'm pretty sure thats the idea of dynamic disks. Its a sort of software raid system afiak.

 

[TheCake]

Thats the exact thing I wanted. Its only for bulk file storage.

 

[Mole]

yea its possible to do that, can't remember how, but if you just go into the drive manager program and do a search in the help, it guides you through.

I did it a couple of years ago on 3 80gig drives, when i started really caining my broadband connection

Just remember if 1 goes, thats it, theres no redundancy at all

Just set them up as spanning volumes

 

[TheCake]

Thanks Mole. Yeah I think I've done it before on a W2k3 server from what people are saying its ringing bells.

 

[chriscl]

Also, remember with XP (like the server products) you can 'mount' the partitions on your other drives into empty folders in the first (or in your case, second) drive.

For example, here your "first" 300GB drive you would create and format as D: and then (from Disk Management) you could mount the other two 300GB 'partitions' within empty folders on the 'D:' drive - so, in effect, your 'D:' drive becomes a 900GB volume.

 

[TheCake]

Thats exactly what I wanted. Thanks Chris.