How to merge 2 different hard drives into one drive?

[vaporize]

i have 2 hard drives on my computer one is C: and the other is D: drive. Now I want to merge the two hard drives into one drive. I know how to merge 2 partitions on the same drive but I dont know how to merge 2 physically seperate drives. I have Partition Magic 8 but I dont see an option to combine the 2 drives. Does anyone know how to put my C: and D: drives togeather?

 

[waylman]

can't be done with PQ Magic........at least not to my knowledge. why do you want to do this anyway?

 

[LED]

Eventhough it's recommended that both HD's be the same....RAID 0...

 

[lameaway]

Get a cheap RAID controller, plug them both in, and run in a JBOD (just a bunch of disks) configuration. You'll also gain a free IDE channel or two.

 

[vaporize]

thanks for the quick replies,

this is my old computer (7 years old). i am not sure if it supports raid and the hard drives are too uneven. one drive is 1 gig and the other is 5 gig. i dont want to spend any money on it. would partition magic 8 let me move all the files and os to the 5 gig drive?

 

[dakels]

*This is just a theory I havent tried this*

I would think of making a ghost image of both drives. Then copying that ghost image in 2 seperate partitions on a single drive. Then come in with parition magic and turning the 2 partitions to 1. Again I have never heard of this so I am not sure it works but I don't see why not. Just don't have 2 working OS's on the same partition

I know can and have used with Norton Ghost taking a partition and create a new smaller partition and ghost it. Like if you have a 80 gig drive one partition but only 40 gigs of data on it. You can make a 40 gig partition image and telling Ghost to place all your data on it. In effect it optimizes/defrags that partition space and creates a smaller partition. Then you can put that ghost image anywhere you want. In fact you may be able to place those images on the same partition but I don't know how prudent that wouild be.

Of course there is always copying the files straight up from one drive to the other

 

[Acanthus]

Win2k can span partitions using the disk manager.

 

[LeeTJ]

win2k can also mount a HD as a folder. that's pretty nice, mount your 2nd hd = My Documents or something.

then store all your important files on second HD. makes it nice if you ever have to reformat and reinstall your OS.

 

[bigpow]

Win2000 or WinXP Pro supports Dynamic Disk (if you want it from DOS level, the only way is to use RAID0)