Features of Dynamic Disk

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, striped, mirrored, and RAID-5 volumes.
• Extend a simple or spanned volume.
• Remove a mirror from a mirrored volume or break the mirrored volume into two volumes.
• Repair mirrored or RAID-5 volumes.
• 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.

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.

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 and mirrored volumes of dynamic disks 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 can install Windows 2000 on a dynamic volume that was upgraded from a basic disk partition, but you cannot extend either the system volume or the boot volume. 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 a dynamic volume that was 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. The upgraded simple volume must match the listing found in the partition table. Extending the dynamic volume changes its size, but the partition table's registration of that volume is not updated to reflect the change. The only dynamic volumes on which you can install Windows 2000 are simple and mirrored volumes, and since these volumes must be registered in the partition table, they must be upgraded from basic to dynamic.

© 1985-2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.