combining hard drives

[Guest]

well i just brought a new hard drive and i want to combine it will my primary hard drive how would i combine them together so it will come up as 1 hard drive

 

[Tom]

well i just brought a new hard drive and i want to combine it will my primary hard drive how would i combine them together so it will come up as 1 hard drive

You dont! Since you are (going to) install it as another piece of hardware, the operating system will see it as another device, and list it in "My Computer" as another drive with another drive letter. If you wanted one drive, you should have bought a drive that has the size of the space you need in total, then install that as one device.

There a a few conditions to doing that though, so you would need to ask about that if you go that route. In any event, if you (are able to ) install the new drive, you would still have the drive space you intend to have, with the ability to use it as such.

 

[Mike Hartigan]

primary hard drive how would i combine them together so it will come up =
as 1 hard drive

You dont! Since you are (going to) install it as another piece of =
hardware, the operating system will see it as another device, and list =
it in "My Computer" as another drive with another drive letter. If you =
wanted one drive, you should have bought a drive that has the size of =
the space you need in total, then install that as one device.

That's not entirely true. Many RAID controllers allow you to configure multiple physical
drives as one logical drive, or even as multiple logical drives with sizes that have no
relation to the individual physical drives other than the overall total size. The OS
then 'sees' only the configuration presented to it by the controller. But, given the
cost and complexity of such an arrangement, I agree that a typical home user would be
better off just buying a bigger drive.

There a a few conditions to doing that though, so you would need to ask =
about that if you go that route. In any event, if you (are able to ) =
install the new drive, you would still have the drive space you intend =
to have, with the ability to use it as such.

One handy way to take advantage of such a configuration is to move some of the so-called
'Special Folders' to the new drive using TweakUI or some functional equivalent. 'My
Documents', 'My Music', even the Desktop folder can be easily moved to the new drive.

 

[Guest]

What you are ateempting to do is known as DISK SPANNING

Yes it is possible to do this with Xp Pro: convert basic disks to dynamic by using the Disk Management snap-in. Xp Pro supports dividing dynamic disks into volumes, which can consist of a portion, or portions, of one or more physical disks.

When you have converted a basic disk to dynamic storage, you can create XP Pro volumes, of which there are three different types that can be utilized on the local system

In particular Spanned Volumes combines disk space from multiple disks up to a total of 32. Data is written to a spanned volume on the first disk, completely filling the space, and continues to the next until it is full and then the next, and so on, through each disk that you include in the spanned volume. These volumes are not fault tolerant either. If any one single disk in the whole entire spanned volume fails, all the data in the entire volume is lost.

For more on this subject go to

http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/10825_1467441_