Dynamic Disk Hardware Limitations

View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q254105

Expand all | Collapse all

SUMMARY

This article lists the hardware that does not support dynamic disks.

MORE INFORMATION

Dynamic disks are not supported on the following hardware:

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1394 serial bus
Universal Serial Bus (USB)
Removable disks
Disks in laptop computers or laptop docking stations

A dynamic disk is a physical disk that contains dynamic volumes created by using Disk Management. Dynamic disks do not use traditional partition tables like primary and extended partitions (logical drives); therefore, dynamic disks cannot be accessed by MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition (Me) or Windows NT operating systems.

For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

222189 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222189/EN-US/ ) Description of Disk Groups in Windows 2000 Disk Management

232463 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232463/EN-US/ ) Option to Upgrade Basic Disk to Dynamic on Laptop Not Available