multiple drives as one

[winchester169]

is there software for xp to cause two drives to appear as one. Drive span used to work for 98 but it no longer made or supported.

[-pops-]

I can't answer your question but, I think Drivespan was discontinued because it was no longer a viable product. It was around (and useful) when drives of 100MB were considered huge. Now you can get drives of hundreds of GB, there is little point in it.

[TizMe]

Is this what you want?

Using NTFS mounted drives

You can use Disk Management to mount a local drive at any empty folder on a local NTFS volume. You can format a mounted drive with any file system supported by Windows XP.

When you mount a local drive at an empty folder on an NTFS volume, Disk Management assigns a drive path to the drive rather than a drive letter. Mounted drives are not subject to the 26-drive limit imposed by drive letters, so you can use mounted drives to access more than 26 drives on your computer. Windows ensures that drive paths retain their association to the drive, so you can add or rearrange storage devices without the drive path failing.

For example, if you have a CD-ROM drive with the drive letter D and an NTFS-formatted volume with the drive letter C, you can mount the CD-ROM drive at an empty folder with the following path: C:\CD-ROM. You can then access the CD-ROM drive directly through the path C:\CD-ROM. If desired, you can remove the drive letter D and continue to access the CD-ROM through the mounted drive path.

Mounted drives make data more accessible and give you the flexibility to manage data storage based on your work environment and system usage. For example, you can:

Make the C:\Users folder a mounted drive with NTFS disk quotas in order to track or constrain disk usage without doing the same on drive C.

Make the C:\Temp folder a mounted drive to provide additional disk space for temporary files.

Move the My Documents folder to another, larger drive when space is low on drive C, and mount it as C:\My Documents.

When using NTFS mounted drives with server clusters, always keep these points in mind:

Make sure that you create unique mounted drives so that they do not conflict with existing local drives on any node in the cluster.

Do not create mounted drives between disks on the cluster storage device (cluster disks) and local disks.

Do not create mounted drives from the cluster disk that contains the quorum resource (the quorum disk). You can, however, create a mounted drive from a cluster disk to the quorum disk.

Mounted drives from one cluster disk to another must be in the same cluster resource group, and must be dependent on the root disk.

[winchester169]

Holy cow TizMe, that is alot of information to take in.. Yeah, that is almost exactly what I am looking for. I have a 9gig XP drive and a 200gig empty drive. I used partition magic to attempt to move the XP to the 200gig to no avail. What I am really looking for is to get more room for "program files" and possibly "system32" folders. this might be exactly the solution I am looking for. I will have to try it out on some non important data first to make sure I am not making errors :)

Thank you!

[-pops-]

To move an operating system to a new drive, the simplest way is to use a disk cloning utility. These are found in backup programs like DriveImage or Acronis.

I've used the Acronis one and it's very easy to do.

[winchester169]

Yes, there is Acronis, Casper, Partition Magic and more the problem lies in the stupid XP authentication. I don't want to deal with calling MS and explaining to them that I installed a larger drive, copied the OS to the larger drive. I do not have the install CD or product key as I picked up the computer second hand and the owner is now in a different state and doesnt have the book any longer.

Thank you for the tip though!

[-pops-]

If you clone the drive it shouldn't be necessary to reactivate Windows because, as far as the machine is concerned, the system is the same. When I've done this cloning, the machine just carries on as before - just better!

I can understand your reluctance though.

A couple of points:

1. The product Key should be on a sticker somewhere on the computer case. It is a condition of use by MS that this is done, although often it isn't.

2. If, by chance, the number is not there it can be found in information obtained by downloading Everest http://www.lavalys.com/

3. If the cloning doesn't work, you will still have the original disk to work from.

4. It is also possible to prepare an Acronis backup file and then use that and the Acronis recovery procedure to write a full version of your drive on to a new one. I'm pretty sure this works with other backup programs.