Well, Chienworks, at least you responded. I appreciate that. It's late and I've been formatting fro 45 minutes and it's only 21% into the format. Looks like I'll have to do it again to convert to Basic Format, too.

The "horror" story was my brother's household PC. His C: drive was(unknowingly) formatted as a Dynamic and brought forth untold frustrations when something when wrong.

All I remember him telling me was: "Don't format as Dynamic!"

Don't remember why exactly. Might have had something to do with backup schemes.

Found this quote at http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/30170267/basic-vs-dynamic-disks.aspx :

"Basic disks are limited to 2TB
Partitions on basic disks aren't as readily expandable as volumes on dynamic
disks (partitions that have been converted to volumes as part of the
conversion to dynamic suffer the same limitations)
Dynamic disks can't be used as shared storage in a server cluster"

And this from
http://www.examcram2.com/articles/article.asp?p=332154&rl=1

"Basic Disks
A Windows XP Basic disk, similar to the disk configuration under earlier versions of Windows, is a physical disk with primary and extended partitions. As long as you use the FAT file system, Windows XP Professional and Home editions, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 9x, and MS-DOS operating systems all can access Basic disks.

On a Basic disk, you can create up to three primary partitions and one extended partition, four primary partitions, or one extended partition with logical drives.

Windows XP supports FAT primary partitions up to 4GB in size. Windows 9x/Me and MS-DOS support only 2GB primary partitions.

If you discover you've created a partition that's too small, you cannot extend it using the Disk Management Microsoft Management Console. However, if you use the diskpart.exe command-line utility shown in Figure 3.1, you can extend a Basic disk partition to contiguous unallocated space. The partition must use the NTFS format and cannot be the system or boot partition....
Basic disks store their configuration information in the master boot record (MBR), which is stored on the first sector of the hard drive. The configuration information consists of the disk's partition information.

Basic disks support spanned volumes (volume sets), striped volumes (stripe sets), mirrored volumes (mirror sets), and Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) Level 5 volumes (stripe sets with parity) that were created (and named) under Windows NT 4.

Mirrored and RAID-5 volumes are fault-tolerant volumes designed to withstand single disk failures. They are only available under the Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 family of server operating systems. Windows XP does not support these types of volumes on either Basic or Dynamic disks.

Dynamic Disks
A Windows XP Dynamic disk is a physical disk that does not use conventional partitions or logical drives. A Dynamic disk is a single partition that can be divided into separate volumes. You can even resize a volume "on the fly" (without a reboot).

Dynamic disks are combined into collective "disk groups," which helps to organize them. All Dynamic disks in a computer are members of the same disk group. Each disk in a disk group stores replicas of the group's configuration data in a region known as the Logical Disk Manager (LDM) metadata partition.

This configuration data is stored in a 1MB region at the end of each Dynamic disk and is the reason you must have at least 1MB of empty disk space for the LDM to convert a disk from Basic to Dynamic.

Dynamic disks can contain an unlimited number of volumes; you are not restricted to four volumes per disk, as you are with Basic disks, and those volumes can be extended if they are formatted with NTFS. To convert a volume from FAT to NTFS, use the convert.exe volume: /FS:NTFS command, where volume is the logical letter of the drive.

Locally, regardless of the type of file system, only computers running Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000, or Windows Server 2003 recognize Dynamic disks. Windows XP Home Edition does not offer Dynamic disks. Dynamic disks are not supported on portable computers.

Managing Basic and Dynamic Disks
Basic and Dynamic disks are Windows XP's way of managing hard disk configuration. If you're migrating to Windows XP from Windows NT 4, the Dynamic disk concept might seem unfamiliar in the beginning, but once you understand the differences, working with Dynamic disks is not complicated. You can format partitions with FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS on a Basic or a Dynamic disk. FAT and NTFS are discussed later in this chapter.

From the Disk Management console, you can only format a dynamic volume as NTFS. You must use Windows XP Explorer to format a dynamic volume as FAT or FAT32. Table 3.1 compares the terms used with Basic and Dynamic disks.....

Reverting Dynamic Disks to Basic Disks
To revert from a Dynamic disk back to a Basic disk, you must remove all volumes from the Dynamic disk first. After you change a Dynamic disk back to a Basic disk, you can create only partitions and logical drives on that disk.

NOTE

Converting to a Dynamic disk is effectively a one-way trip. To convert from a Dynamic disk back to a Basic disk, you must delete all dynamic volumes. This is a considerable downside! If you find yourself needing to do it, however, first back up your data, convert the disk to Basic, and then restore your data.

To convert a Dynamic disk to a Basic disk, perform the following steps:

Open Disk Management.

Right-click the Dynamic disk you want to change back to a Basic disk and then click Convert to Basic Disk.

From what I've read, dynamic just adds a new layer of confusion that I don't need.

You also apparently can't boot from a dynamic disk.

Dynamic offers certain RAID benefits that can be obtained with basic disks and a RAID controller card or chip on the motherboard.

Basic allows only 4 partitions, but one of them can be an extended partition with lots of baby partitions.

I'm way out of my element here, so if I were you I wouldn't take this as the gospel truth.

But I'd keep it simple--er, basic.

Ugh. After almost two hours waiting for the Dynamic to get to 51%, I right clicked on the disk in Disk Management and found I could cancel the formatting.

Then I right clicked under the "Disk 3" (my new drive) and it said, "Convert from Dynamic to Basic."

That brought up a wizard that led me to formatting a Basic partition.

It's now at 1% going toward a Basic formatting scheme.

Enough. I'll check in the morning....

Weird. A couple weeks ago i installed 4 new drives in two computers. Windows XP computer management offered to partition and format the disk for me. I pretty much said "OK" and the process took maybe 6 seconds, probably less, and i had formatted drives ready to go. The drives were between 160 and 500GB, both IDE ATA and SATA.

Unless you plan on physically removing the drive and attaching it to a Windows 98 or Mac system, there really isn't any reason to use FAT. NTFS is faster, more reliable, and allows partitions in the multi-terabyte range.

Actually, dynamic disks are the software version of RAID offered by Micro$oft. No additional RAID hardware is needed to configure multiple HD's as RAID. There's a few articles around the net on this software version of RAID. I've played with a RAID 0 configuration, not nearly as fast as a hardware RAID ), I abandoned the test configuration and moved to hardware RAID.