• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

How to install windows on a dynamc drive?

B

bigstusexy

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 28, 2002
Messages
3,194
Not sure if this is a storage question or an operating system question.

we have a few 2k server and 2k3 server boxes here that have a very stange, but interesting deal.

They are installed on dynamic drives, usually mirroed and spanned volumes but on a dynamic drive. It's not part of it either, its the system and boot drive!


How do you do this?
Picture soon.

EDIT: Promissed picture
Linked for BW savings
 
I remember something too about being able to use the mirroing feature at least but nothing else. However all my attempts to do so after install doesn't seem to work, installing to a dynamic disk doesn't work either. I've searched (although not exhausivly) for how to do so and haven't found it.
 
I can't see how you would be able to install windows onto a dynamic disk.. you need windows in order to create/use a dynamic disk.. basically you need to have windows installed before you can create the disk.. not vice versa.
At least that's my theory.. :D

you can, however, install windows on a raid volume that you create using the onboard raid chip or a 3rd party raid card.. and install windows onto that - be sure you have the raid drivers on a floppy before you start.
 
I think you need to install onto a drive, then add another drive and don't format it. Then in Disk Manager setup a Mirror or Span onto the unused space together with the boot drive.

Though why do you want to install to a Dynamic disk? They are harder to recover if things go bad.. I try to keep my data on basic disks for this very reason.
 
ZeroH I know the difference between a firware raid, hardware raid and windows software raid. This is done on software raid.


I'm not quite sure Lazn, if it were mirroed then you have a good chance of help, also raid 5 will be good to because if one drive dies you can insert a new one and rebuild from a seperate system, dynamic disc can be introduced into a foreign system, so as long as you have multidisk fault tolerance its not so bad.
 
bigstusexy said:
ZeroH I know the difference between a firware raid, hardware raid and windows software raid. This is done on software raid.


I'm not quite sure Lazn, if it were mirroed then you have a good chance of help, also raid 5 will be good to because if one drive dies you can insert a new one and rebuild from a seperate system, dynamic disc can be introduced into a foreign system, so as long as you have multidisk fault tolerance its not so bad.
Click to expand...

True, but I prefer hardware RAID with basic disks.. lots more tools to access the volumes if things go south.
 
I wasn't implying that you didn't know the difference...

still.. i don't see the usefulness of using software raid based on Windows dynamic disks for your OS.. if it a drive goes bad, your windows OS won't boot.. and if it doesn't boot, you won't be able to fix the raid. And Raid 5 would seem to be too slow to be worthwhile for an OS volume.

if it wasn't based on windows, then it could be worth the effort. tho I'd still opt for the non-windows raid. if your motherboard has raid function, that's still better than using windows to control the raid volume.
 
ZeroH you've got tons of ways to fix it,
Windows PE
Removing the drives and placing it into another system
Adding another internal or external drive with windows and recovering.

However all this is a bit off topic, I just want to know if anyone has done this or found specific instructions.

I've got 8megs, not 1 on booth drives as windows always leaves this when you let it partion it but if I try to convert the system disc to dynamic, it doesn't do anything. It is NTFS too.
 
Thanks! I have no idea how in all of my searhing I never found this KB before!

Not to firefox users, alot of KB articles now do no display correctly in Firefox.

I'll try these steps with 2k and 2k3 thanks.

EDIT:

Nut bunnies! I still can't get my boo/system disk to convert, and months ago I wasn't able to install to one. Maybe its the partition size, I'll check for unallocated space again.
 
bigstusexy said:
Thanks! I have no idea how in all of my searhing I never found this KB before!
Click to expand...
I found it, because i knew it existed. It took me a while to locate it again. You're welcome and I hope you will get your problem worked out.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top