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I am optimistic that there are enough people who out of technical interest and curiosity will want to find out the answer to this question also! Please assume, until I prove otherwise, that I understand the details of what a spanned volume does, and the implications of using one, since this is not what my question is about. Then the person who asked the question then realizes that they want to protect all their data, they are not interested in a spanned volume anyway, and no further information is revealed. Unfortunately it is virtually impossible to google any information on this, as all that comes back are explanations that one should expect to lose all data should a physical disk on a spanned volume fail. My question is: What real methods exist for recovering data from healthy physical drives on a spanned volume when one physical drive fails? This question is about avoiding inconvenience of said data loss and not about providing total data protection against a drive failure. If all of the data were lost, that would be more inconvenient. Since this data is not critical, it would merely be inconvenient if some of it were lost. For this reason I have decided to use a spanned volume to store some non-critical data. I do not wish to do anything that places restrictions on how the space can be allocated, such as sym-linking, junctioning, or ntfs mounting one physical drive so that it appears to be a directory on another physical drive.
Windows spanning disk formatting windows#
Legal Notices.I am setting up a storage solution in Windows where I wish to utilize the space on multiple physical drives and have them recognized as a single drive letter. No portion of a spanned volume, an extended spanned volume, or an extended simple volume can be deleted without deleting the entire volume. You cannot extend volumes that are formatted with FAT or FAT32. Disk Management formats the new area without affecting any existing files on the original volume.
Windows spanning disk formatting free#
You can extend spanned volumes that are formatted with NTFS by adding free space.
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In the Create Volume wizard, click Next, click Spanned Volume, and then follow the instructions on your screen. To create a spanned volume, open Disk Management, right-click unallocated space on one of the dynamic disks where you want to create the spanned volume, and then click Create Volume. For example, when a database on a volume is about to grow beyond the size of the volume, you could add another disk to the system and then add that space to the existing volume. Spanned volumes enable you to use the total available free space on several disks more effectively by allowing you to combine the spaces into one volume.Īnother benefit of spanned volumes is the ability to add space to an existing volume when it is full. You can create spanned volumes on disks formatted with FAT, FAT32, or NTFS. When any disk in a spanned volume fails, all data in the entire volume is lost. Windows 2000 writes data to the first disk in a spanned volume, completely filling the space, and continues in this manner through each disk that you include in the spanned volume. Spanned volumes consist of space from 2 to 32 disks combined into one large volume.