Supported by Windows 2000, dynamic disk is a physical
disk initialized for dynamic storage. It holds simple
volumes, spanned volumes, mirrored volumes, striped volumes, and
RAID-5 volumes. With a dynamic disk you can perform disk
and volume management without having to restart the
operating system. Upgrading a
basic disk to dynamic storage will render the
entire disk unreadable to operating systems other than
Windows 2000.
Dynamic vs. Basic Storage in Windows 2000 In Windows 2000, a new storage type has been defined and exposed in the new Logical Disk Management snap-in; previous versions of Windows NT used only basic storage.
How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP This step-by-step article describes how to use the Windows XP Disk Management snap-in to configure a basic disk and prepare it for use. This article also describes how to create and delete partitions, and how to format volumes with the FAT, FAT32, or NTFS file systems.
