Hard Disk Space Management

[BlundaKat]

I have a bit of a riddle I have been working out, im probably missing the obvious so I was hopeing someone could shed some light on the situation.

I currently have 2 hard drives:

1x 500Gb SATA (OS Boot)
1x 200Gb SATA (slower and older drive)

The older drive stores downloads, programs and Games. The main drive is split into 2 partitions one for the OS (100Gb) the rest is for my DVD backups and other media. I am looking to buy a 2tb drive as im starting to run out of space on my media partition. Now the problem is if I move my media to the new hard drive then 3/4 of the main hdd will not be used.

So how do I use the current partition and the new drive as one? because I dont want to have to store my media in 2 different locations. I relise RAID is not possible because they are 2 completly different hard drives. but was wondering if there were any windows tweaks which would show the 2 partitions as one?

A solution for ubuntu would be helpfull aswell as I am considering running it instead of windows and Im not familiar with how linux manages hrd disks.

Thanks for any help

[dirky]

Get the gparted boot cd, it will resize your partition. Do a back up if its important of course

[Hawker1986]

Move all your media to the new drive then go into control panel - admin settings - computer management - disk management, delete the old media partition and then extend the OS partition. Doesn't always work but worth a go for a quick sort out.

Hawker

[BlundaKat]

But thats exactly my problem. If I move all my media to the new hard drive then that leaves about 400Gb of the old hard drive unused. I was wondering if there was a way to link this partition with the partition on the new drive so that it shows up as one partition? because I dont want to store my media in 2 seperate locations if/when i fill up the new drive. Or can anyone think of anything else which may solve this?

Im probably being completley anal about it but I just dont like the idea of having 400gb of hard disk space which isnt going to get used.

[Molotov]

You are buying a 2tb drive to ADD to 700gb you have which you said is just starting to run out

I don't want to state the obvious but you will have tons of spare space whatever you do so why is having space space on 2tb ok and spare space on 500 gb one isnt :S

In the end of the day couldn't you simply move all the crap from the older ****tier 200 to 500 ...
I still don't see the real issue there though especially considering the fact that the new 2tb might be quicker than your older 500 and you'd rather keep movies on that i suppose :S

[BlundaKat]

I see what you are saying but I guess I am just planning ahead. I am currently backing up all my DVDs to my PC as I have ALOT of DVDs and they are taking up alot of room so they are going in the atic once they are backed up to free up room in our lounge.

I dont know if they are goinng to fill up the 2TB drive but if they do then I still have 400GB on another drive I would like to utilise, rather than buy another Hard Drive. For organisation sake I dont want these DVDs in 2 different locations as I am planning on setting it up as a media centre. So the logical answer would be to merge the two drives into one.

I have found some answers to my questions, but this has just bought up another question. If im running Windows I can convert the drives from a basic disk to a dynamic disc which will alow me to create a volume which spans several disks:

technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731274.aspx

If Im using linux I can use the Logical Volume Manager which I beileve is capable of doing this aswell

But are these different methods compatible with each other? The reason I ask is because Im not sure if I want to run the media center as Linux or Windows so I will likely run a dual boot for the time being. In which case if I use the Linux method then decide that I prefer Windows as a media centre OS I want to be sure that when I use the Windows method that the data on both drives are read exactly the same as the Linux method.Im just woried about losing data becuse of the operating systems reading the setup differently. I am guessing I will have issues with the fact they use different partition formats though?

I hope I am making sense here!?

[dirky]

Re-Read the original post. I thought you wanted to expand the primary partition to take up all of the space rather than combine the old and the new (effectively 2tb+400gb=2.4tb).

You can probably do this via dynamic disks but this imo wouldnt be advisable as you will lose the whole lot of the older OS drive dies..

[BlundaKat]

Right, so Gparted uses LVM to do this? Is the right?

Im not sure how LVM works but would Windows run OK on a Hard Disk which has a LVM spanned partition?

[peterb]

It shold do - as far as windows is concerned it is one logical partition.