Question about dynamic disks...

[NathanBWF]

Say if you have 2 hard drives (C and D). Both have been converted to dynamic disks and C dies. After you replace it, re-install windows, convert it back into a dynamic disk you should still be able to see what's on D that was there before correct...?

 

[lokiju]

Yes, Have done it myself many times.

 

[NathanBWF]

Great! Just wanted to check. Thank you muchly. :beer:

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: NathanBWF
Great! Just wanted to check. Thank you muchly. :beer:

Just out of curiosity, why are you running dynamic disks? Software RAID/mirroring?

 

[NathanBWF]

Originally posted by: dclive

Originally posted by: NathanBWF
Great! Just wanted to check. Thank you muchly. :beer:

Just out of curiosity, why are you running dynamic disks? Software RAID/mirroring?

Was tossing that idea around yes...

 

[Smilin]

Hey, just so you don't freak out when you see it.

Your D: drive may show up as foreign in disk manager. Just right click and import.




Also, unless you are going to actually make use of the added features that GPT disks offer (you mentioned mirroring which is a good use) you should leave them as basic.

Checkout this best practices. There is a 2003 and 2000 version of this article but I've not seen one for XP. Same ideas apply though.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;816307

 

[VirtualLarry]

I was kind of wondering about this myself. I have three physical disks in my system, a WD 80GB, WD 160GB, and a Maxtor 250GB. Was wondering how hard it would be to set up two mirror sets, one between the 80GB and a partition on the 250GB, and another between the 160GB and another partition on the 250GB. Since most firmware-based "software RAID" controller cards operate on a drive-by-drive basis, that wouldn't work, so that leaves the idea of using Windows' software RAID support. Is something like that doable, in either W2K Pro SP2, or XP Pro SP1? I assume that I would have to convert all of my partitions to dynamic disks first though, which would (I assume?) leave them incompatible with my Win98se multi-boot. Is it possible for a disk to have a partition that is both Basic and Dynamic at the same time, in order to be compatible with OSes that don't support Dynamic partitions? I thought about the idea, but overall, it seems a bit too complex and sketchy to me, so right now I'm just going to make occasional Ghost backups of my two drives onto the third, and deal with things that way, until I learn more about what exactly would be involved in setting something like that up. Or maybe just buying another HD of the same size as one of my existing drives, and using a different firmware RAID controller. (Not sure how well Promise IDE would mix with CMD RAID.)

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
I was kind of wondering about this myself. I have three physical disks in my system, a WD 80GB, WD 160GB, and a Maxtor 250GB. Was wondering how hard it would be to set up two mirror sets, one between the 80GB and a partition on the 250GB, and another between the 160GB and another partition on the 250GB. Since most firmware-based "software RAID" controller cards operate on a drive-by-drive basis, that wouldn't work, so that leaves the idea of using Windows' software RAID support. Is something like that doable, in either W2K Pro SP2, or XP Pro SP1? I assume that I would have to convert all of my partitions to dynamic disks first though, which would (I assume?) leave them incompatible with my Win98se multi-boot. Is it possible for a disk to have a partition that is both Basic and Dynamic at the same time, in order to be compatible with OSes that don't support Dynamic partitions? I thought about the idea, but overall, it seems a bit too complex and sketchy to me, so right now I'm just going to make occasional Ghost backups of my two drives onto the third, and deal with things that way, until I learn more about what exactly would be involved in setting something like that up. Or maybe just buying another HD of the same size as one of my existing drives, and using a different firmware RAID controller. (Not sure how well Promise IDE would mix with CMD RAID.)

1. Yep; dynamic disks are incompatible with other OSs. It's an either/or thing.
2. XP supports striping but not RAID1/5'ing via software. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314343
3. It's much easier to stick with basic disks and use hardware RAID, IMHO.

 

[Smilin]

Mark one brain fart for Smilin. uhgnush. pftt.

Yep - XP and other non server OS's won't use software raid 0. So unless you are doing software striping on one of your data drives, stick with basics disks.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You cannot create mirrored volumes or RAID-5 volumes on Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP 64-Bit Edition-based computers.

(from the link that dclive gave - emphasis mine)

So does that mean, that if I use a server-edition OS version to create them, that W2K and XP Pro will still support them? (Much like the FAT32 volume 32GB limitation thing?)

I can't believe that MS would allow support for striping, but not mirroring, on XP Pro. That's just.. silly. I can see not supporting RAID-5, but who would want to do that in software on the host CPU anyways.

Also interesting that NT4 can create multi-volume RAID sets, still using basic partitions. That would still be dangerous though, because I would have to manually break the RAID set before multi-booting to a "legacy OS", and then rebuild the mirror afterwards. OTOH, I would have a nice standby backup, in case the legacy OS trashed the disk it was using.