2 hard drives seen as one C drive

[makman]

I have a laptop that came with Windows 7 home premium and one hard drive. I purchased a second hard drive and installed. Is there anyway to set this up, even if it means wiping everything and reinstalling, so that both hard drives are seen as one C drive? My laptop does not have a RAID option in the BIOS. What about if it was Windows 7 professional?

Thanks,

Mitch

 

[zigzag3143]

I have a laptop that came with Windows 7 home premium and one hard drive. I purchased a second hard drive and installed. Is there anyway to set this up, even if it means wiping everything and reinstalling, so that both hard drives are seen as one C drive? My laptop does not have a RAID option in the BIOS. What about if it was Windows 7 professional?

Thanks,

Mitch

Mitch

If you need a raid controller to run those two as a raid. If you are looking just to keep your data safe you can mirror them from within win 7 disk management

Let us know what you are trying to do

Ken

 

[makman]

I don't really need two separate drives within Windows. I do all my backups to Windows Home Server so I am not worried about losing data. I would just like the two 500 GB drives to be seen as a contiguous 1 TB C drive rather than a 500 GB C drive and a 500 GB D drive. I have been reading about spanning and striping but I'm still confused about this.

Thanks,

Mitch

 

[pparks1]

In order to take 2 physical drives and make them appear as 1 drive within Windows you create what is called a stripe...it's also called RAID0. It takes both disks and concatenates them together into one presentable volume. With RAID0, the data is split evenly across the two drives for performance...however if either drive were to fail, you lose the entirety of the data since 1/2 is now missing.

To me, unless you want the peformance increase from running RAID0 and are willing to accept the risks, I would just run a second drive with a different drive letter. This keeps it simple.

 

[makman]

In order to take 2 physical drives and make them appear as 1 drive within Windows you create what is called a stripe...it's also called RAID0. It takes both disks and concatenates them together into one presentable volume. With RAID0, the data is split evenly across the two drives for performance...however if either drive were to fail, you lose the entirety of the data since 1/2 is now missing.

Striping is exactly what I would like to do. However my BIOS in my laptop does not support RAID. The two settings I have are ATA and AHCI. Is there anyway to set this up using Windows 7 home premium or professional (or perhaps if I were to reinstall the OS, during the installation)?

Thanks

 

[valtonray]

i dont think this can be done. i may be wrong although thats unlikely consider it a hardware limitation.

 

[pparks1]

Since you cannot support RAID at the mobo level, you have to do it within Windows. A software RAID is usually slower than a hardware raid, just so you know.

Here is what you need to know;
Information regarding Windows 7 software Raid : Alan's World Famous Blog V2

And with software stripes, you have to create them after the OS is installed...so you can go from what you already have.

 

[makman]

Since you cannot support RAID at the mobo level, you have to do it within Windows. A software RAID is usually slower than a hardware raid, just so you know.

Here is what you need to know;
Information regarding Windows 7 software Raid : Alan's World Famous Blog V2

And with software stripes, you have to create them after the OS is installed...so you can go from what you already have.

I believe I tried that (I tried several things last night). However I couldn't get it to work. I also read that the boot and system volume cannot be striped.

I did try shrinking the C volume and striping the newly unallocated space with the unallocated space on the second drive. That still gives me multiple drives in the OS.

Thanks

 

[Saltgrass]

You could also map the drive to a folder in you Win 7 install. You would then use the folder (link) to access the unlettered partition.

 

[makman]

You could also map the drive to a folder in you Win 7 install. You would then use the folder (link) to access the unlettered partition.

I was thinking of doing that and tried it last night. Windows does say there is only one drive, but it is still 500 GB. It doesn't seem to see the extra space and I am guessing that when I get close to 500 GB of stuff it will tell me that the drive is full.

Thanks

Mitch

 

[ccatlett1984]

You do not need to run raid, you can run both drives as a dynamic disk. But this will involve having to to a clean reinstall of windows on your computer, you can't merge two disks with stuff on them.

 

[makman]

You do not need to run raid, you can run both drives as a dynamic disk. But this will involve having to to a clean reinstall of windows on your computer, you can't merge two disks with stuff on them.

can you give me step by step instructions?

 

[Saltgrass]

I would think something like this would be good for something like storing video or something else that needed a lot of space. I have not done it to the point of filling up a drive, but I would think it would allow for the full amount.

All I might suggest would be to put some large files in the link and see how it reacts.

 

[ccatlett1984]

any way you can give me instructions for reinstalling Win 7 and combining both hard drives to be seen as 1 C drive?

thanks

I just double checked, and its not possible to have dynamic disks as a boot drive on windows 7.

Here is how to mount the second drive as a folder on the first drive.

To mount a drive in a folder instead of as a drive letter you can
Right click on My Computer and select Manage. Then click Disk Management Select the volume you wish to mount inside of another and click Change Drive Letter and Paths From there you choose Mount in the following empty NTFS folder. Then enter the name of the empty folder into the box (that you want the second drive to show up as.)

 

[zapp22]

if I can hitch a ride here. I have two drives of same performance characteristics, but very diff sizes, with win7 ultimate 64bit just fresh-installed on the 80gb, but all my stuff on the 640gb where I was using win xp pro. can I simply add the 640gb into one logical C: drive using 'expand volume' without destroying any data, or do I need to image all this stuff and reformat?