Quick disk partitioning question

[envy me]

This may seem quite basic but I am not sure so I thought I'd ask.

I understand that I can partion 1 physical drive into multiple virtual drives i.e. a 200gig drive can have c: at 100g and d: at 100g


Assuming I have 4 physical hard drives:

is there any way to combine them so 1 drive is c: and the other 3 combined are d:


I would think that this is possible. Also I would rather accomplish this task with fdisk rather than having to use any software for windows.


Thanks for your help.

 

[RebateMonger]

If you are using NTFS formatting, you can use Volume Mount Points. Although you'd have three virtual drives, you can make folders in the first drive that point to the second and third drives. Effectively, the entire contents of the second and third drives are "inside' two folders on the first drive.

This has the advantage of still being able to back up and restore the drives separately and it doesn't require any reformatting of the drives.

There are other ways to combine drives. You can use a RAID controller and do RAID 0 or JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives). You can also use Windows Dynamic Disks and do software disk spanning. But, at least for Windows Spanning and for RAID 0, if a single drive fails, you lose ALL the data on all three drives.