Dynamic Disk Storage in Windows

Dynamic storage is supported in Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional. Dynamic disk does not use partitions / logical drives. Instead, it contains dynamic volumes, such as simple volumes, spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes and RAID 5 volumes created by Disk Management Console.

Dynamic Disks are very flexible. The number of volumes that you can create on a physical hard disk is only limited by the amount of free space available. You can also extend a volume, if it needs more space (if unallocated space is available). Dynamic storage management lets you manage disks and volumes even without a need to restart Windows after a change has been made.

Windows XP Professional can repair a corrupted database on one dynamic disk by using the database on another dynamic disk. 

You can upgrade from Basic to Dynamic storage any time. Start Disk Management (Start > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management). Right-click the Basic disk you want to convert to Dynamic, and click Convert to Dynamic Disk.

Note: After you convert to a dynamic disk, the dynamic volumes cannot be changed back to partitions. You must first delete all dynamic volumes on the disk, and then convert the dynamic disk back to a basic disk. If you want to keep your data, you must first back up or move the data to another volume. Also, do not try Dynamic Disks with multi boot OSes like multiple installations of WIndows on a single system.