Newbiw Question: Spanned drives created in XP not recognised in Win7

[mccabedd]

Hi all.

First off, i'm a total n00b at this, so please be gentle. (and complete apologies to all admins if I have posted this in the wrong forum catagory)

I have an XP system (SP3) which has an eSATA RAID card installed connected to a storage box containing 4x 1.5 TB HDD's.
In XP, I converted the 4 drives to a single spanned 6TB volume (K: Drive)
In my array manager, the 4 drives read as contiguous.
In the disk management, they read as spanned dynamic. All good so far.

Now, I need to update the OS to Win7.

I have read that spanned disks created in XP will not be recognised in Win7.
So, I installed Win7 on a laptop and connected the storage box via an eSATA PCMCIA card.
It only recognised the 1st 1.5TB drive in the box.

I then boot the XP system with GParted to find that the drives show as unallocated space.
Reboot into normal XP and everything as is it should be.

I'm thinking of a test by creating another partition on the C: drive and install Win7 on that (Dual boot XP/7) to see how Win7 recognises the drives, but I have a hunch that it will only recognise the 1st 1.5TB drive again.

I don't want to lose any data on the storage box, however would like to upgrade my OS, and for it to recognise all volumes.
Now I don't mind if Win7 sees the drives as one 6TB volume, or 4 1.5TB volumes, as long as I manage to keep all my data on the drives.

Can anyone help, or offer suggestions please?
Am at my wits end googling and trying to figure out a solution on my own.

Thanks,

David

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi Dave, and Welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Well, you're no noobie if you are working with dynamic spanned drives giving you a hugh 6 TB volume!

For accuracy, is the expansion card in your XP box an eSATA card, or a RAID card or both? As you know, spanned volumes are not RAID volumes.

Check the Win-7 laptop to see if Win-7 was installed on a Basic Drive, Primary MBR partitions, or Basic Drive, GPT partition type.

What I'd do initially is connect the spanned disks back on the Win-7 system, and see how the drives are listed in Disk Management.
Under the Disk Status column, see if they are possibly recognized as Basic Drives rather than Dynamic Drives, then check the status, if they are Online, Offline, Online (Errors), Foreign, or Missing.

That might give you information as to why they are not immediately recognized by Win-7. Until you make a final decision as to what to do, I wouldn't change the status because you might not be able to go back to your Win-XP setup.

Possibly others will have some good points in why you are having initial recognition problems.