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→Creating a New Spanned Volume using Disk Management
A new spanned volume can easily be created using the Disk Management interface. For the purposes of this chapter we will be creating a spanned volume which spans two physical disk drives. In this example we will work with a system containing three disk drives. Disk 0 is the system drive containing the Windows Server 2008 operating system. Disks 1 and 2 are both initialized using the MBR partition style and have been converted to dynamic disks but have yet to have any volumes created on them. The objective of this tutorial is to create a spanned volume which uses the entire capacity of disks 1 and 2.
Assuming that the Disk Management snap-in is currently running, right click on the first disk drive and select ''New Spanned Volume...'' from the popup menu.This will invoke the ''New Spanned Volume Wizard''. Click ''Next'' on the welcome screen to proceed to the disk selection screen as illustrated in the following figure:
[[Image:windows_server_2008_spanned_disk_selection.jpg|Selecting the disks for a Windows Server 2008 Spanned Volume]]
This screen provides the option to select disk drives from which the spanned volume is to be constructed. By default, only the drive on which the new volume is being created is listed. Consequently, the ''Maximum available space'' value reflects only the space available on the current disk. In this example, however, the volume is going to span both disks 1 and 2. To enable this we need to select disk 2 from the left hand list of available disks and click on ''Add>>'' to add to to the selected disks. Having done so the amount of space from each drive may be selected up to the maximum combined space from both disks:
[[Image:windows_server_2008_spanned_disks_selected.jpg|Two disks selected for a Windows Server 2008 Spanned Volume]]
With the desired total volume size configured by selecting each drive and selecting the amount of space top be allocated the ''Next'' button may be pressed to move the drive letter or mount point allocation screen. Select either a suitable drive letter or mount point and click on ''Next'' to proceed. Finally, select the file system format and disk compression options and once again click ''Next'' to proceed to the summary screen. To initiate the creation of the volume click on ''Finish''. After a short delay the Disk Management graphical view will show the volume being formatted on both drives. When completed the spanned volume is ready for use.
== Creating a New Spanned Volume from the Command Prompt ==
== Converting a Simple Volume into Spanned Volume ==
