up vote 2 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I'm running Windows XP and my C drive is almost full. I want to add a second internal hard drive and I want that space to be also considered the C drive. Is this possible? Thanks!

P.S.- Don't know if it's relevant, but since it's an older computer, the drive will have an EIDE interface (have scoped out which one, haven't actually bought it yet).

link|improve this question
80% accept rate
This is a programming related site - this sort of question belongs over on superuser.com or serverfault.com – middaparka Dec 31 '09 at 19:45
feedback

migrated from stackoverflow.com Dec 31 '09 at 19:48

This question came from our site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

What I would do instead is buy the biggest drive you can afford, make that your primary drive and move everything from the old drive to the new one using an image tool. Trying to merge physical drives into a single drive letter without making use of a raid array is difficult and prone to errors and failures. Not to mention if your primary disk fails you will permanantly loose all data on both drives. The second drive cannot be used by itself once it's linked to your older primary drive.

link|improve this answer
Can you recommend an imaging tool that will migrate data between drives with different physical layouts? Last time I checked (and that was a LONG time ago so hopefully thing have changed), that was not an easy thing to do. – Eric J. Dec 31 '09 at 20:06
1  
With most imaging tools nowadays, the hardware is irrelevant. You can image one drive and restore it to a completely different drive with most any image tool such as Norton's Ghost. There's a guide to doing this here: pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=418 – BBlake Dec 31 '09 at 20:14
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

Yes, you can use the mklink command to mount the new drive under your existing one.

NOTE: Mklink is Vista only. I'll post the XP equivalent shortly.

EDIT:

Check this link for the XP variant of Mklink (free download from Sysinternals) and example usage.

link|improve this answer
"Mount" seems like the wrong term for this. Links allow you to reference physical space on one drive using a path that references a different drive letter. You could use it to make a drive appear bigger, but it won't be seamless. For example, if you want to add more space for installing programs, you can't somehow make c:\program files larger. You would have to do something like temporarily move some other files to make space, then install the program, then copy it to the other drive, then mklink to add a link from c:\program files to the other drive. Not a great user experience. – skypecakes Jan 6 '10 at 20:27
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

you can use junction to create directory symbolic links.

link|improve this answer
I accidentally upvoted this, meant to upvote the one above instead. Links will sort of work but will not be fun to work with; see my comment regarding mklink. – skypecakes Jan 7 '10 at 7:07
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.