Extend a drive onto a USB drive or during XP setup?

[OldPueblo]

Okay I know, odd question. Here's the scenario and I could've sworn I read somewhere long ago that this was possible. I have an EeePC 7G with 4GB internal SSD and 4GB SDHC installed into the internal USB card reader. XP works fine on it, I can put all the data and installed programs on the second "drive" without issue leaving the first drive for the OS, updates, whatever. I also updated it to 2Gb RAM and overclocked it to 900Mhz.

BUT

I have a curiosity question which is could I somehow aggregate the two drives together in what's effectively RAID0? The problem is I don't think I can insert any kind of layer before or during Windows setup that will do this, and I don't think I can make the main drive a dynamic disk and then extend it over because the second drive is effectively considered a removable drive. I thought maybe I can install the Hitachi microdrive filter and make the USB drive a fake local drive, but haven't had a chance to yet.

Bonus question:

Vista has the option during setup to extend a partition, but the internal USB drive doesn't show up in the list of available drives. Does anyone know of a driver you can install like you would a hard drive controller driver that can "unlock" a USB drive and allow Vista to treat it like a local drive during setup? Yeah, yeah, I know, why Vista on an EeePC? Just curious to toss it on and see how it acts, it is after all only going to be used for typing and Internet and with 2Gb RAM once it's loaded I'm guessing it'll work fine. So please don't go there in this thread, it's just for fun.

[OldPueblo]

Okay you bunch of "no reply'ers" this is what I've found so far. Here was my plan:

1. Install Vista to 4GB SSD.
2. Install Hitachi Microdrive filter to make 4GB USB SDHC a local drive.
3. Convert SSD to a dynamic disk and extend it onto the blank SDHC effectively giving me a single 8GB partition.

Here's where it failed. I completely forgot you can't boot from a dynamic disk, so after the initial reboot with the changes I'm in a no boot. :( So plan B now is to make a small partition at the beginning that will house only the bootloader and then install Vista to a second partition I create during setup. Then proceed back to plan A.

Does anyone happen to know how large that first partition needs to be to fit the bootloader and anything else I'm not aware of that's required to boot? I'm going to shoot for 10MB and see how it goes. Has anyone tried this, or do you see anything glaring that I'm not missing?

Also, Vista is surprisingly decent in terms of speed. I actually only hacked out obviously large things that I knew "most likely" would cause no trouble later, like language packs, media center, etc. Even if I have trouble, this is just a toy I can wipe anytime so no biggie. If this doesn't slow down at all when I put on office, I may just leave it on Vista for the added benefits of familiarity for my wife, file sharing on my all Vista network, mobility options, etc.