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Partition Help by LoochTheMan on 08-08-2007 at 05:56 AM

My computer has 2 x 250 GB hard drives, but I only initially started with 250 GB. How can I add the other 250 GB onto my exsisting memory without creating a new disk drive?

Thanks.

RE: Partition Help by Adeptus on 08-08-2007 at 06:32 AM

Your question is somewhat unclear, so I am just going to state what you can do.

1) You can format the previously unused hard drive and assign it a new drive letter.  For example, if you already have drives C: and D:, it would become E:.  It sounds like that is what you don't want to do.

2) You can format the previously unused hard drive and map it as a folder under an existing drive.  For example, it could become C:\Music.  Note, however, that doing this doesn't truly merge the drives, it just links them under that path.  You will be able to put 250GB worth of files in the linked folder and its subfolders, which will go on the second drive.  However, everything else on the first drive will remain constrained to its size, so this is not quite like having a single 500GB volume.

3) The only option that will give you a fully functional illusion of a singe 500GB volume is a RAID-0 stripe set.  There a couple ways to set this up, either through Windows or through RAID support on your motherboard, but none of these are non-destructive.  You will have to back up the data you want to keep and reformat.  There is another drawback to choosing this option -- it doubles your chances of losing data to a hard drive failure, since now you have two drives that can fail, either completely destroying the integrity of the volume.

Think it over and respond by posting which you want to do, and I am sure you will receive more specific instructions after having it narrowed down.

RE: Partition Help by LoochTheMan on 08-08-2007 at 06:34 AM

Im thinking more of option one. I want to add the unused 250 GB to the C: drive that is currently using the other 250 GB.

RE: Partition Help by user27089 on 08-08-2007 at 07:18 AM

You can merge the two drives, but the second drive needs to be empty, otherwise a lot of data can be lost.

You can do this through disk administrator, press windows key + r, then type in "compmgmt.msc" in this window, click "Disk Management and the window will appear, have a fiddle around with this to try and do it.

I don't have 2 physical drives so I can't try it out.

RE: Partition Help by ShawnZ on 08-08-2007 at 12:05 PM

quote:
Originally posted by LoochTheMan
Im thinking more of option one. I want to add the unused 250 GB to the C: drive that is currently using the other 250 GB.

you're thinking of option 3.
RE: Partition Help by MeEtc on 08-08-2007 at 01:05 PM

Just remember though, if you choose this setup and one of your drives goes bad on you, you lose data from BOTH drives. Making a spanned drive is a similar configuration, but data on one drive will only be made inaccessible when the other fails, it can be recovered.

more info from Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343

•    A spanned volume is created from free disk space that is linked together from multiple disks. You can extend a spanned volume onto a maximum of 32 disks. A spanned volume cannot be mirrored and is not fault-tolerant.
•    A striped volume is a volume whose data is interleaved across two or more physical disks. The data on this type of volume is allocated alternately and evenly to each of the physical disks. A striped volume cannot be mirrored or extended and is not fault-tolerant. Striping is also known as RAID-0.

RE: RE: Partition Help by LoochTheMan on 08-08-2007 at 04:56 PM

quote:
Originally posted by traxor
You can merge the two drives, but the second drive needs to be empty, otherwise a lot of data can be lost.

You can do this through disk administrator, press windows key + r, then type in "compmgmt.msc" in this window, click "Disk Management and the window will appear, have a fiddle around with this to try and do it.

I don't have 2 physical drives so I can't try it out.

My second drive hasnt been used so it is empty. If someone knows how to do this definitively that would be helpful because I dont want to  loose data that I already have or screw up my computer.
RE: Partition Help by Adeptus on 08-08-2007 at 09:21 PM

quote:
Originally posted by LoochTheMan
My second drive hasnt been used so it is empty. If someone knows how to do this definitively that would be helpful because I dont want to  loose data that I already have or screw up my computer.
The problem with Traxor's suggestion is that you can't extend the boot volume, even if you convert it to dynamic.  So, you can only do that if you have partitioned your drive -- you would then be able to exted the second, non-boot partition.

What you could potentially do if you have a single partition is the following:

1) Create a dynamic volume on the second, presently empty drive;

2) Move all your data files to the new volume; leave only Windows and the installed programs on the first drive;

3) Shrink the partition on the first drive using some partition resizing software;

4) Convert the first drive to a dynamic disk and extend the new volume on the second drive with the now unused space on the first drive.

The result would be one smaller volume for Windows and applications (let's say C:, 100GB) and one big volume for all your data, spanning both drives (let's say D:, 400GB).  Many (including myself) prefer to partition their disks that way instead of single volume, anyway.

If you do this correctly and nothing goes wrong, you should lose no data -- however, backup, at least of your critical files, is still highly recommended.  Resizing "accidents" are rare, but not unheard of.  :P

Edit: all of the above assumes you have Windows XP Professional or equivalent Vista edition.  XP Home doesn't support dynamic disks and I'd assume the lesser Vista editions don't, either.
RE: Partition Help by LoochTheMan on 08-08-2007 at 09:37 PM

Lets say I disregard my request.

How would I go about just creating another drive ( I already have c: ) with the remaining 250 GB?

..sorry for being n00bish

RE: Partition Help by Adeptus on 08-08-2007 at 09:48 PM

quote:
Originally posted by LoochTheMan
How would I go about just creating another drive ( I already have c: ) with the remaining 250 GB?
Start, Run, type "diskmgmt.msc", click Ok.  When Disk Management console appears, find your second drive, which should show as all free space -- right click in the free space and create a new volume.  I don't recall the exact verbiage of the menu, but it should be obvious.
RE: Partition Help by Snake on 08-09-2007 at 02:28 AM

I'm going to assume you have all your files in the My Documents folder. You can format and set the new drive to another drive leter then go "Start"->Right Click on My Documents then change the path to the new driver letter. Of cores you would have to copy all of the "My Documents" folder over to the new drive.

I will tell you that using a Raid-0 is a Very, Very, Bad idea. Spaning a OS over two drives is just seting your self up for disaster.

All these options are good but if you were going to make a RAID-0 I would recomand buying 2 more dirves and make it a RAID-5 with backup.

RE: Partition Help by Adeptus on 08-09-2007 at 04:16 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Snake
I will tell you that using a Raid-0 is a Very, Very, Bad idea. Spaning a OS over two drives is just seting your self up for disaster.
As stated elsewhere in this thread, RAID-0 doubles (or triples, if you use three drives, and so forth) the chance of drive failure.  The MTBF of the array is MTBF of a single drive / number of drives. 

Given the high MTBF of modern drives, it's still not a huge risk -- but it is a risk, nevertheless.  The risk is usually taken for performance reasons, since good RAID-0 should have data transfer rate almost equal that of a single drive * the number of drives.
quote:
Originally posted by Snake
All these options are good but if you were going to make a RAID-0 I would recomand buying 2 more dirves and make it a RAID-5 with backup.
You only need one more drive for RAID-5  -- the minimum is considered to be 3 and theorethically it could work with 2 (but then you would be much better off using RAID-1).  However, the more drives you have, the more cost effective it becomes -- the capacity of RAID-5 is the combined capacity minus one drive.

The problem with RAID-5 is horrible write performance, which gets worse with the number of drives -- after each write, the corresponding data zones on the remaining drives have to be read (if not already cached), the parity computed, and the corresponding parity zone updated.  Software RAID-5 (which includes most low end motherboard-integrated controllers) is pathetic and I'd not consider it if I couldn't afford a decent controller, with an adequate dedicated processor and a good amount of dedicated cache memory.
RE: RE: Partition Help by LoochTheMan on 08-09-2007 at 05:28 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Adeptus
quote:
Originally posted by LoochTheMan
How would I go about just creating another drive ( I already have c: ) with the remaining 250 GB?
Start, Run, type "diskmgmt.msc", click Ok.  When Disk Management console appears, find your second drive, which should show as all free space -- right click in the free space and create a new volume.  I don't recall the exact verbiage of the menu, but it should be obvious.

I have an MDG and on the back of the CPU tower it says 2 x 250 GB (500GB)...and yet I do not see this second disk drive. Whats wrong with this picture?

[Image: t_previewm_facfe4a.jpg]
RE: Partition Help by Adeptus on 08-09-2007 at 06:47 AM

According to that screenshot, you only have one 250GB hard drive -- or, perhaps, two configured as RAID-1 mirror set on an onboard RAID controller.  That pretty much eliminates all the things we've been discussing so far. 

If you have two drives in a mirror set, you can probably break it and do something else -- but that could get slightly complicated.