You can also resize dynamic
volumes to include free space on other dynamic disks, a process known
as spanning. Dynamic disk groups can be transferred between supporting computers by physically
moving the drives then importing them into the disk manager, essentially merging the
groups.
Dynamic disks are necessary for
creating striped and mirrored drives, XP's RAID capabilities. As the boot drive
(the drive containing the Windows directory) cannot be resized, even if it made
dynamic, this feature is primarily useful on systems with two or more physical
drives.
Dynamic
drives have several limitations,
namely they must be created on drives using the NTFS file system, they
cannot be read by any Windows operating system other than Windows 2000, XP professional
and Windows Server 2003. They can also not be created on drives which
contain earlier versions of Windows or non-Windows operating systems, since they
will render these unreadable.
Windows System Restore
A
feature new to Windows XP, system restore is an advanced version
of the 'rollback' option found first in Windows Me. Essentially system restore operates
in the background and takes snapshots of your computer's configuration at
set intervals. These snapshots contain a working backup of the windows registry, and
a record of all other information necessary for restoring your computer functionally back to the
point in time when the snapshot
was taken.
For example, upon
installing any new software, system restore first takes a snapshot of
the existing system configuration and saves it to a portion of the hard
disk reserved for this information. If the software in question manages
to severely mess up your Windows installation, system restore can be used to
restore the snapshot taken prior to installation, removing the offending software from the registry, and
erasing the installed files from the
hard drive.
Of course, this will also
remove any other software added since the restore point mentioned, though personal data (data in
the 'my documents' folder or subfolders)
will remain.
If you want to examine how
system restore is set up on your system, go to 'start / programs/ accessories/ system
tools/ system restore' then choose 'system
restore settings.' From here you can
choose whether you want system restore to be active on your system or
not, and how much space you would like it to reserve for restore points on
each drive.
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