Learn Windows XP Professional: Using the Disk Management Tool (Page 4) Page 4

Dynamic
Disk Limitations

Just like
anything else, with certain advances there are certain
limitations and drawbacks.

• Laptop Limitation.
  Dynamic disks are not supported on laptops,
  removable disks (such as Jaz or ORB drives), detachable
  disks that use Universal Serial Bus (USB) or IEEE 1394
  (FireWire) interfaces, or on drives connected to a shared
  SCSI bus. On laptops you do not even see the
  option to convert basic disks to dynamic within the Disk
  Management tool.
• Multi-boot
  considerations. Dynamic volumes cannot be accessed by 
  MS-DOS,
  Windows 95,
  Windows 98,
  Windows Millennium Edition,
  Windows NT 4.0, or
  Windows XP Home Edition operating systems
  that are dual-booted with
  Windows XP Professional. If you want
  computers running these operating systems to be able to
  access the data, you need to store the data on basic
  volumes.
• Extending Volumes.
  When basic volumes are converted to dynamic they may or
  may not have an entry in the partition table depending on
  whether that volume was a system or boot partition. If the
  volume that was converted was originally a system or boot
  partition it retains its old entry in the partition table.
  You can install
  Windows XP Professional on that volume;
  however, you will be unable to extend it. If the converted
  volume was not originally a system or boot volume, it will
  not have the old partition table entry. You won’t be able
  to install
  Windows XP Professional on the volume, but
  it will be possible to extend it.

  Volumes converted from
  partitions on
  Windows 2000 systems
  have an entry in the partition table. On
  Windows XP Professional systems, volumes
  converted from partitions do not have an entry in the
  partition table unless the partitions were originally
  system or boot partitions. You can see if a volume has an
  entry in the partition table by right-clicking the volume
  within the Disk Management tool. If the Extend Volume
  option is disabled, the volume has an old entry in the
  partition table.

That’s a
wrap for this week. Be sure to check back in next week for
the next article in this series.

In
the meantime, best of luck in your
studies and please feel free to contact me with any
questions on my column and remember,

“Absolute anonymity isn’t practical, or possible, in real
life or on the internet.”

Jason Zandri
Jason@Zandri.net

www.2000trainers.com