How do I make two hard drives appear as one?

Question

I have a 120 gig C: drive and just installed a 300 gig "slave" hard drive. THe second hard drive has its own letter D:. Can I make them appear as one large C drive so that I don't have to chose between drives?

Answer 1

This is called RAID 0 and you need either a controller card that supports hardware RAID or software. Software like VERITAS Volume Manager can let you create a RAID, however I would recommend against it unless you really want to. The failure of either one of the disks would cause all your data to be completely lost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Some newer computers with SATA controllers come with built-in hardware RAID, but very few computer montherboards with IDE usually have built-in RAID unless they are high-end motherboards or servers.

If you want to try software RAID here is a guide someone has written that walks you through it if you happen to have Windows XP Pro or Windows Server. Use this with caution as doing this incorrectly could cause your system to become unbootable and cause the loss of data!

http://www.techimo.com/articles/index.pl?photo=149

You can also simply change the target of your My Documents folder. Right click on My Documents and select Properties and then Click on Move or Find Target and point it to your D: drive.

An alternative if you're running Windows XP Pro would be to mount your NTFS filesystem on drive D: to an empty folder on drive C:. You will still have a drive D: but you'll be able to access it via the folder.

To do this right click on My Computer then select Manage > Disk Management. Select drive D: and right click and select Change Drive Letter and Paths. Click on Add and then select Mount in the following empty NTFS folder. Browse to the empty folder and then click OK.

P.S. RAID 1 is when you take two hard drives of the same size and mirror them, basically making a copy of the other hard drive. This means if you loose one to a hardware failure you still have another backup.

Answer 2

Whatever you do don't RAID your cards since it will drop the 300 gig down to 120 gig so you will have 240 gb instead of 420. It automatically uses two equal sized harddrives and will downsize to the smaller one.

Partition magic may be able to combine the drives to appear as one.

Answer 3

I can't think of a way to make your drives be recognized by your system as a single 420 gig drive nor would I want to. Having separate drives or at least partitions is advantageous.

Answer 4

that is completely 2 walls - the doubtless 'Empty' one, received't be empty, it ought to correctly contain fix information for use contained in the shape that your pc suffers issues. frequently at the same time as booting up, the show screen will immediately show a message advising you that you'll be able to pres a function key (F6,F8 etc.) to finish particular initiatives - many times in case you press F11 that is going to boot you right into a fix application that takes each and every of the archives from the fix Partition to re-construct your pc. So if your pc is operating wonderful - go away the partition because it is, that is there as a secure practices internet might want to all of it go abdomen up! interior the documentation that got here with the computer, might want to be information on the thanks to apply the fix partition & practise on coming up rescue discs (Which I strongly propose you do) - it is person-friendly and could many times in hardship-free words take 2 DVD's or about 9 CDR's. desire That helps! R.

Answer 5

You need Raid 1

Answer 6

no the other one is only a slave a extra memory a reserve data etc

Answer 7

Doesn't an E-IDE card allow RAID configuration as well?