Problem converting basic to dynamic disk

I'm trying to convert my HD to a dynamic disk so I can add a second disk and mirror one of the volumes to provide some fault tollerance. Every time I try to convert the disk, it starts to boot the OS (WinXP Pro), then gives me a stop error and says seesion3_initialization_failed. Usually that's a hardware failure I think, but I'm not sure why since nothing really changed. The next time I boot up after that error it boots back to normal, but the disk is still basic. The HD is in two partitions called C: and

. I assume formating the whole drive, re-installing the OS and immediately converting to dynamic before I add all the other stuff that's floating around my system would work, but I'm trying to avoid that. Any ideas?

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Comments

dtlokee

I didn't think you could mirror disks on Windows XP Professional, is taht something new? It used to be only the server OS could do that in software

qs1pos

Windows XP Pro does not support RAID5 or mirrored volumes. However you still should be able to convert your disk to dynamic. Here is an article that may be helpful.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343

dynamik

You are correct. However, there are various hacks to get Mirroring and Raid 5 working on XP Pro.

[edit]
I just re-read the original question. Are you trying to mirror two partitions on the same drive? I'm not sure you even can do that on OSes that natively support mirroring. Even if you can, if your disk fails, you're still going to lose all your data. That's not going to provide any fault tolerance.

JayrodEF

No, I have two disks, but the first disk wasn't converting to dynamic.

brad-

I assume you have NTFS partitioned drives?

I also assume your drives that you want to mirror are identical and are going to do the XP workaround?

I would run your diskcheck/repair utilities to see if maybe you've got a bad sector before trying to convert. Other than that im at a loss. You should just be able to go to disk management, rightclick, and convert it.

dtlokee

Was it originally formatted with something other than Windows XP/2000... I had a problem one time with a system that had been configured to dual boot with another OS that was installed first and it wouldn't allow the conversion because dynamic disks need a larger MBR space than the other OS provided.