add a second hard disk but have one C drive

[65Years]

Sorry if this has been asked already. I want to add another hard drive (probably 80 Gig) to my XP machine and have it so that I will make my Crive larger by the new amount. There is currently one hard drive installed. I know how to physically install the second drive but do I need software to make it add on to my Crive so that I have one big drive? Thanks.

 

[edfair]

Sorry, it doesn't work like that. They will remain separate.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[65Years]

ok thanks for the reply

 

[inblack]

I think it's possibile to alocate two or more drives to one partition; one could merge the new harddisk to a folder on the old hardisk with Partition Quest Magic; or, there is a setting in XP (or it was a 2003 ? u'll have to dig the net for the right windows) that allows raid software, and one big partion with two or more hard-disks, but u'll have the risk of loosing everything, if a hard-disk fail.

 

[micker377]

What is the size of your current C: drive? You could also use "Active Disk", but we are getting very complicated here!

 

[65Years]

The current disk is 80Gigs including 5 Gigs for Linux which I assume is called an extended partition (dual boot)and XP is installed so the capacity is now about 70 Gig. I am thinking of adding another 80 drive.

 

[wolluf]

The 2 ways of combining two physical drives into 1 logical unit I can think of are RAID 0 striped array and using dynamic disks. The first usually needs hardware (PCI card if mobo doesn't support it) the second is supported by 2k & XP (but once disks are dynamic, can't change them back - without wiping them - and nothing else can access them).

Why do you need to combine - ie, why do you need 160GB contiguous drive space? Wouldn't it be just as convenient to create one or more partitions on the new drive as required?

 

[pptvictor]

If you have RAID, the easiest solution is just to use the JBOD (just a bunch of disks) setting rather than RAID 0. You won't get the speed, but it's a little safer in case of hd failure. With that, windows will see the 2 (or more)drives as 1. You can have partitioning with this setup too. However, I havent played around with this much and I don't know whether setting this up will require a hd format or not.
--victor.