Windows 7 Combined Hard Drives

DigDugFighter

Well-Known Member
I have two 1TB HDD"s combined into one for my D:\ totaling 1.81 TB.

I have 88GB free space left. What would happen if I uncombined this drive or would it allow me to at all?

I can deal with a few problems like it not knowing where a program is. I just don't want the drives to crash and need formatted.
 
How do you have the 2 drives setup...some sort of RAID configuration? If so and you brake the RAID array then you will loose all your data. With only 88 GB of space left are you seeing any warnings from the OS that it's almost full? Have you thought about adding another HDD to the system?
 
I just combined them with windows 7 disk management. OS is on a third drive, SSD. No warnings.
If I right click on data drive D, it has an option to shrink. You are saying I will lose all data?
HDD.png
 
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Well that's a new one on me...I've not seen nor heard about that. Trying to find out info on how to do that in windows 7.

It might have something to do with the fact you have them set as Dynamic disk's instead of basic. I see that the color of the drive is purple which I've never seen before.

Shrinking the volume, is just creating a partition....doing that, you wont loose your data. You will only loose your data if in RAID mode....which I don't think you have but could be wrong.
 
It doesn't look like I can do it anyway. I don't even know how I could get both drives apart even if I delete everything from D:\ haha
Oh well. I just thought maybe it would add a little performance.
Shrink.png
 
Well that's a new one on me...I've not seen nor heard about that.

It might have something to do with the fact you have them set as Dynamic disk's instead of basic.
It is "Dynamic disk". Note it says when converting back from dynamic to basic,
If you want to keep your data, you must first back it up or move it to another volume.
This is because the file tables will be overwritten so the files saved on the disks will be orphaned. That is, it will be like you deleted them. The files will still be there but there is nothing in the master file tables telling the OS and disk controllers where to go find them.

That is, unless you use a 3rd party app like EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition to convert back to basic disks. This is a great program I use to resize partitions and it is free to home users for non-commercial purposes.

While it claims no data loss (and I have never experienced any) you should ALWAYS backup your data before doing anything with your partitions. An untimely power outage or fluctuation, drive failure or any number of things could disrupt the process in the middle, corrupt the drives and ruin your day. So make a back up of anything you don't want to lose before even thinking of doing this.
 
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