Dynamic Disks and dualing Linux

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From: tlviewer (tlviewerSHRUB_at_yahooCHENEY.com)
Date: 11/14/04 

Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 19:11:02 -0800

Hello,

My system:
    VIA P4 M266
    Win2k sp3, with a few extra patches
    Matrox g550 (dual head)
    hda: Maxtor 40 GB
    hdb: Maxtor 122 GB
        (video capturing, audio recording, etc)
    hdc: 250 GB (firewire)

When I first installed hdb, I used the built-in
Win2k Disk Manager Snapin. I didn't think about it when
it made it a Dynamic Disk (rather than a Basic Disk).
I was mostly concerned about the partition sizes -- which
there were three.

Recently I went to install SuSE 9.1 Linux. I downloaded
the 5 ISO set and booted into the installer. It warned
me that there was a problem to resize the 6th partition, but
before it did anything! I aborted the install.
It seems that when I made the 3 partitions, I wasn't careful
enough to use all of the disk.

I did take precautions and backup before I tried again.
The 2nd try wasn't so innocuous, I completely lost use of
hdb. I couldn't find a way to repair it with the DM snapin, but
the MaxBlast CD did the job. I had to start over with the
volumes and partitions, but this time the Maxtor software
made hdb a Basic disk. Again I made 3 partitions and was sure
to use all the disk space.

This time running the SuSE installer it found only 3 partitions.
It kindly pointed itself at the first one, resized it down and
created its own Linux partitions (2). In the process the
last 2 Windows partitions became logical drives (np).

http://4.11.211.97/SuSE-Disks.png

I'm still not sure if it was the Dynamic Disk that caused
the trouble, or the unused disk space. Fortunately I only
had one hickup to deal with.

regards,
tlviewer

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