WARNING: Before Attempting any of the procedures or tips presented here backup
your system and data to an external source in case you make a mistake or
something fails.
Now depending on why you are adding the drive and what was already on it you may
or may not need to do anything additional.In my example here the system automatically added the drive with the
first available drive letter. The old hard drive has lots of old data on it and
an old version of Windows that I no longer want.So one of the things I need to do is erase the drive, but more
importantly I think it should be reformatted.
In our example we are going to leave both drives as Basic drives for now, but we
are going to reformat the older FAT32 drive as NTFS.BTW: In the case of a used drive, if
you don’t know what format your drive currently is using you can right click on
the drive and select properties or use the Disk Management option inside the
Computer Management Console to see the File Format.
Notice that the File System for my C: drive shows NTFS in the properties window.
There are several ways to bring the Computer Management Console up, but the
fastest way is to go to “My Computer” and right click it.In the menu there will be a “Manage”
option.Selecting this option will
bring up the Computer Management console.
Right click on “My computer”
Select the “Manage” option.
Click on Disk Management.
What you should see is a list of your drives on the right panel and information
about each drive in the boxes under the list.
Shown here is the Management Console with my test machine drives displayed.
The simplest way to accomplish formatting is to right click on the drive in your
“My Computer” window and select format.
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Typical format options from the My Computer/Drive letter format.
Since we are already in the Disk Management of the Computer Management console
anyway we will do it here.
Warning:Formatting a drive will
cause it to lose it’s data.
Right click on the drive letter for the drive you wish to format and select
“format” from the menu.
You will be presented with some formatting options.In this case we are going to name
our new volume as “Extra Space” and we want to format the drive as NTFS and we
are going to use the default allocation size.Notice that almost 3GIG of our drive is going to “overhead.”
Typical format from the Disk Management console.
There is an option for doing a quick format, but that is not something you
should do in this case since it merely erases the files that are on the drive
and we want to change the drive from FAT32 to NTFS.
Notice there is an option on this screen for mounting the drive in an Empty NTFS
folder.We are going to ignore it
for now, but later we will demonstrate how this “Folder Mounting” is
accomplished.
In our sample case the old drive was setup as a bootable drive so we will get a
message stating that the drive needs to be unmounted.Clicking OK generally gets you past
this message and the formatting will take place.
The formatting can take several minutes, but the Disk Management window will
display a progress percentage as shown here:
Once the NTFS formatting is complete the drive is ready for partition
assignments. Notice in the picture below our added drive is marked as "unallocated". Drives must be setup in partitions (or in the case of Dynamic drives, volumes) so that the operatingknows how the drive is going to be
used.
We are going to make this drive a single partition using all of the available
space and we are going to assign the partition the letter E.On our sample computer the DVDROM
burner is already using drive D: and at least for now we do not want to change
this.
Use the Primary partition setting.
The partition is completed
quickly and the drive is all set for use.
A quick and easy way is to add our second drive to a drive letter assigned to a
shared folder.Here is how it
works.
You make a new folder on the first partition or in this case the C: drive.In this example we will name it
something like “_web development.”
Now Share the folder.Using the
Disk Management option of the Computer Management console we can map the seconddrive letter E: to the shared folder
and assign the second drive to that folder.
The following video will show you an example of how this is all done.
Now we can copy and create files in the _web development folder just like it was
a folder on the c: drive,but they get written to the E: drive.The contents of the folder and the contents of the E:drive are the same thing.
Warnings and Notes:Backups should
be set to backup the second drive because it will not necessarily be considered
part of the c: drive. Some utility programs such as benchmark testing may
incorrectly report the drive speed as that of the second drive and not the
first.
The benefit of this is that you can treat it like part of the c:drive.Data that was taking up room on the
c drive can be moved to the e: drive but still be accessed like it was the c:
drive.This is especially useful as
a quick fix on servers where multiple users are accessing a folder on a drive
that is running out of space.You
can move their shared data, assign the empty folder to the new drive and move
their shared data back again.It
still appears to them to be in the same location, but now the data is not taking
up space on the E: drive.
So given our focus scenario of adding a second drive what option should you
choose?It depends on what you want
to do with it.In our previous
example we added the second drive as a basic drive and extended our C: to it
through the use of a blank shared folder.A better way to do the same thing would be to make a spanned volume set and use part or all of the second drive
for the C: drive. However, we would need the first drive to be Dynamic also and
don’t forget some of the drawbacks to using a Spanned volume set.
So let’s say you have weighed all of the options and you have decided that you
want to convert your disk and use a Spanned volume.First you must make both disk
Dynamic. Then you must make the two disk drives a Spanned volume.
Converting to Dynamic Volumes
In our scenario leaving the first drive as an NTFS Basic disk is the best
choice, but for the purpose of demonstration we are going to show the process of
converting a disk to Dynamic.
To convert a disk to Dynamic from Basic you should use the Disk Management tool
in Computer Management. and do the following steps:
A demonstration video follows these steps.
Warning:Dynamic drives cannot
easily be changed back to BASIC drives. All of your data should be backed up as
a precaution.
Right click on My Computer and select manage.
Click on the Disk Management option.
Click on the Drive number of the drive you wish to convert. This particular
option often causes people to fumble.You must right click on the disk label in my demonstration this is “Disk 1”.
Select the option for converting the disk to a Dynamic volume.
Note: If the disk already has a partition or partitions on it the new Dynamic
volume or volumes will be the same.
In the sample video below we convert the Basic Disk to a Simple Dynamic volume.The conversion happens quickly.To demonstrate changing volume sizes
and extending existing volumes we delete our newly created volume and make a
small volume that is then extended to double its size.
Warning:Our demonstration drive
does not contain any data we wish to keep.Deleting a volume loses any existing data.
Additional Resources:
Basic Storage Versus Dynamic
Storage in Windows XP
Always seek professional help: The tips presented on these pages are meant as a guide to
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not comfortable with the technology being discussed contact a professional for
assistance. Recommendations and reviews are based on the authors own experience
with a process or product. Your results may differ. The website author is not
responsible for problems, loss of data or other complications derived from the
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