setting up a simple file server in my basement.

[Al Neri]

I'm creating a file server, very very basic, just a few hard drives in an old PC with WinXP. I'd like to use partition magic and make it appear as one large hard drive. If i were to to do that, would i be able to install windows on a 200gig hard drive, and make that part of the one large drive?

Or do the drives i link together have to be blank?

(i dont care what OS is better to create a fileserver ,XP is what i'm using 🙂)

 

[Kid Vicious]

i think once you've raid 0ed all the drives together you would still have to setup a separate partition to install the OS, just because of XP's capacity limitation.

setting up a separate partition for XP could be a little bit better, since it would reduce fragmentation in the OS and paging file.

if you were just merging partitions on a single drive, the drive doesn't need to be blank, but if your raiding i think it does.

. . . granted, you probably already knew all this.

 

[Al Neri]

On another server ... I have 3 hard drives, basically full... is there any way I can combine the three as one big drive without wiping the media off of them?

 

[Kid Vicious]

i think to setup up the raid array properly you need to format the array, then install the OS, and move whateve data you have onto it, so the drives would need to be blank or else just back everything up before you try it.

if you want the continous space of the three drives, i think raid is your only option. but otherwise its just as easy to map a network drive that each networked comp would have access to since its autoconfigured in XP.