Drive Spanning - There Must be an Easier Way

[madcat]

What Virtual Machine program are you using that allows you to have more than 1 drive?

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. I believe it's a free download these days from M$.

[bdgbill]

Thanks for all the help.

I think this is the first time I have heard anyone say that XP Pro was any more useful than XP Home. Even John Dvorak said it wasn't worth the extra money.

I think the easiest cheapest solution is going to be a raid card. Even if I had XP Pro on my GBPVR machine I would be worried about a performance hit with dynamic partitions on my old PIII.

I think as drives get cheaper and files get bigger (HD?) that it would be very useful to have some way of using multiple drives built in to GBPVR.

I'm going to pick up a cheap RAID card (and drop it into my last PCI slot) and a new drive in the next few days. I'll let you know if it works.

[kmoore]

That is one scenario with 'dynamic' disks, and not available in XP Home...

That's right. Need XP Pro or any Win2k. I used Win2k Server on my PVR box (Celeron 400 w/ PVR-350) and I had two old 7200rpm drives laying around from college. One was 18GB and the other 27.3GB. I ended up partitioning 4GB of the 18 for the OS/downloads/GBPVR/swap-file and the remaining 14GB + the 27.3GB drive I made into one dynamic disk that is now my D drive. System runs like it was one physical drive. Or at least I don't notice any nasty overhead. I'm pretty impressed. Though I am starting to find the 40GB limiting...but hey that's better than the 27.3 I would have originally had.

[pBS]

couple notes...dynamic disks must be ntfs, it will convert a fat drive when making it dynamic...yes, the data is lost when you lose a drive, same as striping,

only real differences between raid striping and dynamic is: with striping, every file object is spilt amongst both drives, while with dynamic, the first drive fills up and then starts on second drive...and also fat table is on the first drive no matter what..so even when writing only to second drive with dynamic setup, the first drive wil still get used as it's the only one with the fat to update..
[sometimes non-striping-spanning is available with raid also, but not always..]

think of it like a deck of cards, striping is 2 decks deck shuffled evenly and treated as one, dynamic is one deck stacked on the other treated as one.....

the fat table always has to be on the first drive with dynamic, with striping half of everything is on both...

oh and you can't boot off a dynamic disk...but ya can with raid..
and you can't go back to normal 'basic' disk type without losing data..
so really it's only good for your recording data drives, and back it up by file, cuz most imaging software can't understand rebuilding a dynamic disk partition even tho it may be able to back it up ...


Enjoy

[kmoore]

oh and you can't boot off a dynamic disk...but ya can with raid..

Right, but you CAN boot off a physical drive that has a dynamic disk partition on it. Just keep a smallish partition for the OS and applications. The rest can be used for the dynamic disk.

[bdgbill]

I am giving up on this for now. All of the various options have problems.

The problem PBS mentioned of no longer being able to image my drives with Acronis is a deal breaker.

Now that I have a quicker machine on the way I will be more willing to install plugins. May give the video archive or my videos plug-ins a try.

I'm sure Sub will address this issue eventually.

[pBS]

you can actually image them, but usually the image software doesn't know it's dynamic, so you'd have to restore to a drive that was big enough for the whole thing...
i remember seeing one imaging backup solution that could handle the dynamics, but can't remember which one... plus there's a way to do it manually..
[like i would image the drive, then build a new dyn. disk in winxp and then file-restore the files back to the newly made dynamic disk...no problem..
it doesn't need to boot or any of that other partition stuff so not a big deal..
and no real security stuff on the recording drives to worry about..
mostly it's cuz you can rebuld the disks fine, but how to tell windows that its a dynamic disk? it would see the 2 partitions and assume they were basic,not dynamic..
[that's why it can't boot off one, the windows has to set them up to read them, and until it can, it has to be able to find the files to do so..catch22]

i'll play with it some more to see if it is possible to backup and restore semi-normally...

[pBS]

well it worked for me...after a few tries to see how it wanted it done...lol

what i did was: used Image For Windows, and imaged both drives...[it knew they were dynamic] no problem,just like normal..
[btw,that's the baddest imager anywhere,bar none! and i've used them all..compare if you dare..you'll be amazed...even dos dvd burning! back up your c: drive to your c: drive...try that with anything else!]
[btw,IFW fits on a floppy! lol not hundreds of megs of crap like all the others]

The tricky part is restoring, but not a big deal..
first add drives and make them dynamic again...no need to format, just a spanning volume, so windows knows the geometry to use...reboot....
then just restore both images to respective drives..

now i'm not sure if you need to have same size repl. drive as original, will try that next..

[IFW will auto-expand the partition for you for bigger drive] but not sure about windows...tho when u setup the dynam. part. it should have new geomtry...

after i restored them, they were usable right away...no reboot...

probably works same with other imagers, just remember to make a new dynamic spanning disk before restoring...
now to go get a 500gb drive to tack on....hehe
Cheers all!

[pBS]

seems to only work on drives that are the same size as the original...
i tried even allocating the same size from a larger drive and it wouldn't work..
[i think it looks at drive sectors geometry,not partition size]

more experimentation is needed...as well as a little reading..
need more low-level details..
something about the order of what you do...

i'll still use this, as i'll most likely just file-copy for backups of shows...
that way you can add a new larger drive no problem...just re-setup the dyn. disk and copy files back..nothing special..more flexible actually..

but the os drive gets imaged...

[pBS]

ahh,both paragon hardisk manager and Ghost[not sure which versions tho] can backup image a dynamic disk...paragon is nice,very full featured..ghost we all know..[but new ones arent really the old ghost anymore,they bought Drive Image and now it's that, disguised as ghost]

apparently ,paragon can also convert dynam. back to basic disk also!
lots of goodies in there..

acronis can, but only server or enterprise editions..
i already have an old version of paragon around so i'll try that..