Upgrading to "dynamic" drives?

Hi All,

Can a person upgrade a drive from "basic" to "dynamic" without losing the info on the drive? I have a large (120G) drive partitioned into 4 drive letters: D, E, F, & G. I plan on leaving my boot drive "C" as is. All are formatted with NTFS. Any pitfalls in doing this?

TIA!

Russ

 

Why do you want to do this? What's wrong with the way it is now?

 

Basic --> dynamic will not involve any data loss. And it is pretty painless to do.

But the question of "why" is a good one. Especially if you have a single IDE drive.

If you haven't already, take a look at HOW TO: Convert to Basic and Dynamic Disks in Windows XP Professional and the links at the bottom to other articles that explain more of the concept.

You don't specify your OS but this feature is only available on XP-pro. XP-home doesn't support dynamic disks.

 

Hey Newt,

I am running XP-Pro, and 2 drives. I do NOT intend to alter my boot drive "C:" at all. Not really sure I want to do this anyway, I'm really just checking to see if it is "painless" (as you specify). I'm thinking with 4 partitions on my second drive, I could more easily resize them as needed later...

The second drive currently is a primary partition (D with 1 extended partition divided into 3 logical drives (E:, F:, G. I do some VB programming which is all on G:, my music and downloads are on F:, installed programs files are on E:, and D: is for large media files. I'd like to be able to resize the "drives" according to what fills them up first.

Russ

 

I read some of the knowledge base on Dynamic Disks and groups. Very interesting concept.