How can i merge a 8 gig and 3 gig drive into 1 partition

Combat squirrel · 27 Feb 2006 at 12:46

As title really, I have ultimiate boot cd 3.5 and 2 physical HD's, I want to partition 2 drives into 1, I dont have RAID for IDE on the mainboard unfortunatly, any ideas?

CS

semi-pro waster · 27 Feb 2006 at 12:52

It may depend on your motherboard but you could try setting up a JBOD(Just A Bunch Of Disks) array however I think this only applies on new motherboards(Nvidia specifically). Other than that I'm afraid I don't know of any way to conjoin the two.

Combat squirrel · 27 Feb 2006 at 12:54

cheers semi pro, iv found a way of doin it in windows with some disk managment software, so guess ill do that, install xp and carry on

Combat squirrel · 27 Feb 2006 at 17:14

hmmmm seems i carnt join 2 physically seperate drives (both ide, 8gb and 3gb) into one 11gb drive, any software anyone know of which will let me ? under xp

Tried using Acronis Disk Director and still no go

michael baxter · 28 Feb 2006 at 01:58

Why Oh Why?

I hope your just doing this for the fun!

A new 40G drive is around £30! A new drive would be faster and quieter, and use less power and be more reliable!

I think you may need a RAID card for a JBOD setup.

But, I'd be interested to find you can do this with software..........

....I could cobble together an old Pentium system with a load of old crap drives, as a cheap fileserver...........

Combat squirrel · 28 Feb 2006 at 14:24

i beleive there is a way using windows 2000 stuff but i cannot rememeber, yeah its for fun, i have a mess around system with which im trying do random stuff

Sigg · 28 Feb 2006 at 14:56

Not exactly what you want, but you could mount one drive within a folder on the second, or mount both within the same folder on another drive.
To do exactly what you want I think that you either need both drives connected to a RAID controller & create a JBOD array or use a server version of windows which (I think) lets you create software arrays from dynamic disks. I'm sure you can set up software RAID in Linux as well.

philds · 28 Feb 2006 at 17:34

You can do this from 2000 Pro/XP Pro within Disk Management. First get both drives plugged in and make sure they are visible in DM, then upgrade both disks to Dynamic Disks, create a a partition on the 8GB disk and then create a new partition on the 3GB as an extension of the 8GB disk, you will be asked in the wizard which partition to extend, just select the corresponding drive letter. No need for RAID, although you can do that too in DM you'll be limited to 3GB.