Windows 8 Can anyone tell me why my D:\ drives show as 2 drives?

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

I'm not really having a problem, but I don't understand why my D:\ drive shows as 2 drives in Disk Manager.
I got this way when I tried to move space from what was my Windows 8 C:\ drive to the D:\ partition.

If you click Properties you get the same information for either one, which show it as all one partition.

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When Windows 10 goes live, I'm going to format the whole drive and install Windows 10 where Windows 8 is now, but I'm wondering it there is a way to get it to show the D:\ drive in one piece.

I think this is why it converted the drive to Dynamic since I don't really think I have too many partition to have a basic format on the drive, if it showed correctly it would only be 3 partitions.

Mike

 

[Jimbo22]

Are you aware that your 2 disc's are in different format types...0 is basic and 1 is Dynamic?

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

Yes they were both basic before I took space from G:\ and moved it to D:\.

At that point Windows 8 stopped booting, it warned me that it would become a dynamic drive so I knew this would happen, but I'm not sure why.

I've done this before without it changing the format, but I think it's because it's seeing drive D:\ as 2 partitions (putting me over the limit) even though it's not.

I wasn't going to change it back until I do a clean install of Windows 10, when it goes live, but now I'm thinking of formatting it and restoring it from my image files.

I have every thing on Drive D:\ backed up to an external hard drive and I have several system image files for Windows 8.

But I'm curious as to why is shows the D:\ drive as 2 partitions?

Mike

 

[ussnorway]

They are mirroring each other i.e. the same info on both… by design this allows a file server to handle higher volumes because it has multiple copies of the data. There is no advantage to doing this on your home system and in fact the data on both drives will likely become corrupt in the event that one fails.

p.s. The correct procedure was to delete the d drive back to unallocated space and extend the g drive into that now-blank area… Then recreate the d drive again. Drive formatting works left to right and that’s why techs wanting to test a system temporally will always try to place the test drive at the (right-most) end.

p.p.s the maximum primary drives allowed at windows boot time is four… any more than that and the install will not succeed.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

Well I guess after christmas I'll remove all the partitions, format it, and restore Windows 8 from my image file.
Then I can copy everything else back to D:\ from my external drive.

The part I don't get it that if I look at properties for either of the partitions shown in the lower part of the screen, they both show the total disk space as what they add up to, not as individual partitions.

In the upper part of the screen it doesn't show 2 D:\ partitions, just the one full sized partition.
J:\ is one of my DVD drives that happens to have a blank disk in it.

The rest are partitions on my 2 internal hard drives.
Which should be 3 each.\

Data Storage and Backups, Windows 10, and Graphics Video and Music on one drive.

Windows 8, System Reserved, and Games and Windows 10 Software on the other.

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Mike

 

[Trouble]

Looks to me like your D:\ drive in explorer reflect the sum of both your D:\ drives in Disk Management
Is it possible that when you made one of the partitions you chose not to assign it a drive letter and chose instead to "Mount in the following empty NTFS Folder"???
Just guessing of course.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

What I did was to shrink the volume on the Windows 8 drive (it used to take up half the drive, 500 GB) down to 300 GB, which left 200 GB of unallocated space on the drive.

I then extended the volume of the D:\ drive by the amount of space that was available.

I expected to just get a larger D:\ drive not 2 of them.

I'm not sure that there are 2 of them, I think it may just not be displaying what's happening for example.
It there were 2 drives wouldn't they use twice as much disk space from the drive.

I checked the backup drive and it has the same amount of space allocated for the data as is shown on the drive in disk management 318 GB.

So there is no more disk space being used than is necessary to contain the data once.
The same amount that is shown in Windows Explorer, which just shows as a normal D:\ drive.

Mike