Booting from dynamic partition Windows 10 Pro

[wrightcolin]

Hey everyone. My brother came to me with a problem that I can't seem to solve. His problem is simple. He has a 160GB hard drive, and 6 different people use that computer. Recently he's been complaining about how slow it is, and sure enough, when I went to check it out, he had less than 20GB left.
Being a good brother, I offered him a 640GB HDD that I had lying around, but he declined because A) It's too much work to remember to save and download to the new hard drive, and B) He doesn't want his kids jacking with his important shit, which they will do if they find it. He refuses to reinstall Windows and start over fresh, which rules out a hard drive upgrade, as well as RAID, unless RAID has changed in the past 10 years to where you can set it up without formatting.
I read an article the other day about Basic disks and Dynamic disks, and my understanding is that dynamic volumes can span multiple physical drives. Looking into this more, I also found people having issues booting from dynamic partitions. Has this been corrected in Windows 10 (Pro)? Is this a viable option?
Sorry if this is in the wrong category, I wasn't sure if this should go in Win10 or Storage.

 

[JaredDM]

Why not just clone the current HDD onto the new one, then adjust the partition table to take advantage of the additional capacity?
- Problem solved.

I don't think going to a RAID is the answer here. That'd be just multiplying the chances that you'll end up with a catastrophy.

 

[wrightcolin]

Why not just clone the current HDD onto the new one, then adjust the partition table to take advantage of the additional capacity?
- Problem solved.

I don't think going to a RAID is the answer here. That'd be just multiplying the chances that you'll end up with a catastrophy.

I would absolutely be willing to try that. Do you know of any free cloning software that works? I don't want to pay for something I'm going to use once and then forget about. Also, this question was specifically about dynamic volumes though.

 

[JaredDM]

DDrescue is a great tool to use in Linux. There is a GUI version, but it's just as easy to just type in a terminal command to do it. Many Linux live builds include ddrescue and you can just boot off a CD/DVD or thumb drive. Here's a tutorial about how to use ddrescue to clone a drive.

As to dynamic volumes, yes they can be used to add drives to a RAID or volume set. Given that the drive is already being used independently as a single drive you'd only have the option to convert to RAID 1 mirror or just a JBOD array. Booting up should not be an issue.