WinXp Dynamic Disk (Spanning existing disks?)

oplin

Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2002
Messages
831
Is there anyway i can span multiple harddrives while keeping the data on them? I would prefer to do it with dynamic disks in a spanned volume set. I have 3 or 4 disks with about 1200 gigs on them that i can't get rid of to from the spanned set and then copy it onto them.

otherwise is there a way i can just few a bunch of folders on different hard drives in one main folder that can be accessable acrost a network as 1 folder?
 
Question 1: Pretty sure I know, but not positive, so I'll plead the 5th for now. ;)

Question 2: Huh? Complete sentences would help. Since I don't have them I'll just guess you're asking if you can access another hard drive through a folder on another rather than using a drive letter. If that guess was inaccurate skip the following.

The answer to that is yes you can. Just go into disk management (start>run type diskmgmt.msc), right click on the drive and select change drive letter and path. Then check Mount in this ntfs folder and point it to an empty folder on your other harddrive. This will NOT erase anything on the drive. You obviously can't do this with the system volume.
 
I think he's asking if he can set up spanned disks without losing the data on them....

First, you can only set up spanned volumes on dynamic disks, the creation of the dynamic disk will not lose data.

I'm not sure what you think you are doing. Spanned means you add unallocated space from a different disk to make an existing volume bigger. I'm not sure you can "combine" data from different volumes into one single spanned volume without creating the structure first. You can convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk without data loss, but cannot convert back to basic without deleting data. It sounds like you have already converted to dynamic disks so this may not apply.

If i have a disk that is part of a volume and is full, i can add unallocated space from a different disk or volume to make the original volume bigger. This is now a spanned volume. If you want to combine different volumes into one spanned volume you may have to save your data, create the spanned volume then replace the data.

All this can be done from control panel/admin tools/comp mngmnt/disk manager

I hope i understood your question properly. :confused:
 
Yeah, that helped.

The second question i was asking was if i could take a bunch of folders from different hard drives and combine them into one folder (all the contents shown in one folder) and then share that folder on the network.

I got a new 200gig drive and deleted a bunch of stuff so i'm going to try and free up enough space to just do all the disks at once. Takes a while to move 600gigs over only a 100m/byte network :(

Creating a bunch of spanned drives to keep movies in is just as good as keeping them in single drives about right?? Have about 700-1000gigs of movies i'd like in one location.
 
Yeah that looks like exactly what i want. Looks a little over my head though. But i think i'll try it out.

Does windows 2003 server have all the stuff winxp pro does? I want to play games, program, and manage databases mainly all in the same os. Would it be better just to upgrade to longhorn beta? And how easy would it be to set everything up in server2003?

I might stay with just the dynamic disks thing, i managed to create a 500gig drive which is better than where i was and i can just do a bunch of 400gig and 300gig drives for other content.
 
There are people who have used S2k3 as game boxes. You're going to have a lot more overhead with a server OS, especially if you're running Active Directory.

As far as ease of setup it all depends on your skill level and your egarness to learn. If you have no experience with the Server line, and you don't like doing hours of research, it may frustrate you. I taught myself by installing it on an extra machine and playing with the features until I knew what I doing.

If you're looking to setup DFS you need to have Active Directory installed, set it up as a DNS server, setup file sharing, permissions, DFS itself etc. So it will take a while, especially if your new to the game.
 
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