BADMOTORFINGER.com

Ever seen one of these before?

If you’re a geek like me, you will recognize this as the fancy Microsoft “dynamic” volume. I have two such volumes on my PC today, and much to my chagrin. I’ve read numerous times from Microsoft fanboy sites that these are the volumes to use for large storage due to some substantial capabilities over standard volumes. Yet it has always escaped me why it still makes sense when it comes at the cost of complete elimination of low-level access to the data contained within. Someone please enlighten me.

Case and point - I am rebuilding my PC, currently. I got Norton Ghost this spring… the last time I rebuilt my PC. After considerable work setting up the perfect virgin build, I saved the build to my big 400Gb volume for safe-keeping.

Well, come time to benefit from my labor, I first shuffle some disks around to add a big new 500Gb SATA I got ahold of. (tipping my PC over 1Tb All happy so I boot into the Ghost recovery console to blow my virgin image (hehhe), and what do you know… it says I have NO DISKS. Well, I know they are happy and functional - long story short - dynamic volumes render the disks unreadable to any access save an already running OS into which I can import the volumes. Well, I already broke my stripe set, so the old OS is gone. So much for that idea, and so much time wasted.

Now I get to rebuild from scratch - luckily I already have the WinXP source I painstakingly slipstreamed my SATA driver into. I guess I can’t expect the windows OS distribution model to support keeping up with changing hardware drivers… oh wait… I CAN expect it to. It just doesn’t. Why should it when we’ll do it for them the hard way? Ubuntu is looking better all the time. (speaking of which - if you haven’t tried out 7.10 - omfg - for once I haven’t anything to complain about - beautiful, even on my lappy.)

So back to my point - someone help me understand this whole windows dynamic volume thing! And to further extend the challenge - help me understand how it is not just a feeble attempt to make up for the fact that it isn’t a journaling file system. If it were, wouldn’t need such app-layer remedial extensions to provide these capabilities, and I wouldn’t still need to frigging defrag, now would I?