Basic and Dynamic Disks and Windows XP

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This section goes into more detail regarding how basic and dynamic disks relate to Windows XP. Basic disk storage uses normal partition tables supported by MS-DOS, Windows 9x, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. As mentioned earlier, a disk initialized for basic storage is referred to as a basic disk. A basic disk contains basic partitions, such as primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives, as defined above. Such partitions also include multidisk partitions that are created using Windows NT 4.0 or earlier, such as volume sets, stripe sets, mirror sets, and stripe sets with parity. For Windows XP, however, it is important to note that XP does not support these multidisk basic partitions. Any volume sets, stripe sets, mirror sets, or stripe sets with parity must be backed up and deleted or converted to dynamic disks before installing Windows XP Professional. Like Windows 2000, Windows XP Professional does support dynamic disks. XP dynamic disks can contain dynamic volumes, such as simple volumes, spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID-5 volumes. With dynamic storage, disk and volume management can be performed without having to restart Windows.

What about XP Home Edition? Dynamic disks are not supported on Windows XP Home Edition or laptops running any version of XP. In addition, mirrored volumes or RAID-5 volumes cannot be created on Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP 64-Bit Edition-based computers. However, a Windows XP Professional-based computer can be used to create a mirrored or RAID-5 volume on remote computers that are running Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, or Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. The user must have administrative privileges on the remote computer to do this.

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