Disk Concepts and Troubleshooting

Disk Management is very flexible. The number of volumes that you can create on a physical hard disk is limited only by the amount of available free space on the disk. You can also create volumes that span two or more disks and that, if you are running Windows 2000 Server, are fault tolerant.

You can perform the following tasks only on a dynamic disk:

  • Create and delete simple, spanned, and striped volumes.

  • Extend a simple or spanned volume.

  • Reactivate a missing or offline disk.

Dynamic disks are not supported on portable computers. If you are using a portable computer and right-click a disk in the graphical or list view in Disk Management, you will not see the option to upgrade the disk to dynamic.

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Note

On some older and non-Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI)–compliant portable computers, you might be able to upgrade to dynamic disk, but it is neither recommended nor supported. Dynamic disk is not supported on removable disks, nor on disks using Universal Serial Bus (USB) or IEEE 1394 (also called FireWire) interfaces.

The limitations of dynamic volumes occur in the following situations:

When installing Windows 2000    If a dynamic volume is created from unallocated space on a dynamic disk, you cannot install Windows 2000 on that volume.

The setup limitation occurs because Windows 2000 Setup uses BIOS calls that only recognize volumes listed in the partition table. Only basic disk partitions, as well as simple volumes of dynamic disk that were upgraded from basic disk partitions, appear in the partition table. Dynamic disk does not use the partition table to manage its volumes, so new dynamic volumes are not registered in the partition table as they are created. Windows 2000 must be installed on a volume that is correctly represented in the partition table.

When extending a volume    You cannot extend either the system volume or the boot volume in dynamic disk. Neither can be part of a spanned volume, since Windows 2000 considers extended volumes to be the same as spanned volumes.

Windows 2000 cannot extend any dynamic volume that existed as a basic volume before the dynamic disk upgrade, and the system and boot volumes (which might be one and the same) are likely the same volumes that existed under basic disk. Upgraded simple volumes in dynamic disk are still hard-linked to the partition table and must match the listing found there. Extending a dynamic volume changes its size, but since dynamic disk does not record volume changes to the partition table, upgraded volumes cannot be modified in this manner. The only dynamic volumes that can be extended are simple volumes created after the disk was upgraded to dynamic disk. If you want to extend an upgraded non-boot or non-system volume, delete the upgraded volume and recreate it under dynamic disk. You can use Windows 2000 Backup to save all the data on the volume and restore it after the volume has been recreated. Use Disk Management to assign the new volume the same drive letter or volume mount point as the original volume to ensure that all drive letter connections continue to work after the change.