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It is possible to MERGE drive letters in Win2K Pro? (1 Viewer)

John_Berger

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Here's the scoop. Thanks to NVIDIA's recent fu*ked-up Detonator drivers, I ended up completely reinstalling WIndows 2000 Pro.

I took my old drive (a 60 GB with a C: and D:) and made it secondary to a 40 GB. So, now the 40 GB is C: and the old C: and D: are D: and E: respectively -- obviously.

What I'd like to do is keep my 40 GB as C: but merge the two logical partitions on the old C:/D: drives into a single 60 GB D:.

Without knowing exactly how much room I'd need, I could always try to move the data from D/E to C, repartition and format the second drive, then dump the old data back. This assumes that I have the spare room on the new 40 GB to do that. At this point, I might, I might not. I figured that I'd pose the question now and determine if I need the answer later. :D

Is there any tool/utility/other (besides using enterprise-level software like Veritas Volume Manager) that can allow me to do a live migration and expansion of D/E? Can Partition Magic or one of those tools handle this kind of thing?
 

Wayne Bundrick

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Partition Magic should be able to do it.

As an alternative, in Windows 2000 you can mount a NTFS drive into a folder on any other NTFS drive, sort of like Unix.
 

John_Berger

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Not sure how your network relates to mounting drive folders.
Okay, if you're not referring to mounting a file system across the network, what are you talking about? I freely admit that I don't a have a clue about what you're referring to. :)
 

Rob Gillespie

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OK, you know in unix when you mount a drive or partition, you place it in the directory tree. The same thing can be done with drives/partitions in W2K and XP. Instead of giving the partition a letter, it's given a folder.

So in this instance, instead of the partitions on your second hard drive being referred to as D: and E:, they could simply be mounted as folders anywhere on your system.
 

John_Berger

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Once again, Windows steals technology from UNIX. Oh, golly gee. I'm shocked.

:D

(I had to. You know that.)
 

Wayne Bundrick

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Stolen technology? I recall reading that whole lot of things about the way Windows NT works is based on the NT project leader's experience from developing VMS. Stolen idea, maybe.

Microsoft's system for putting different network drives into one directory tree is called DFS. I think clustering will do it too, probably via DFS.
 

Steve_Ch

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>>Stolen technology? I recall reading that whole lot of things about the way Windows NT works is based on the NT project leader's experience from developing VMS. Stolen idea, maybe.
 

Max Leung

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I've been able to assign different partitions, even from different hard drives, into one drive letter. I think it is called "Striping". However, you can't do it if data is already in the partition I think, so you need to wipe them out.

It's very risky to do that though...if one hard drive fails, you've lost everything!
 

Wayne Bundrick

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Apples and oranges, Max. John wants to combine two partitions that are on the same drive. You'd never want to stripe two partitions from the same drive, it would be pointless and I don't think Windows even allows it.
 

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