Combining multiple drives into one drive

Hi,

I couldn't find an answer through a search of our forum, couldn't find anything.

I would like to combine three each 2TB drives onto a single 6TB Drive in Windows 7. All I could find on the Internet was Spanning or Striping my existing drives. I want to remove the older 2TB Drives and replace them with a single 6TB Drive. That's why I have come to the "mountain".

If possible I would like to keep the partitioning to retain the existing paths on the drives. I am okay with a flat drive so long as the pathing and Registry are made compatible in the new single drive.

I have the EaseUS programs and thought they might be able to do it, but they can't per their chat line.

Do you know of a way to do this either through Windows 7 or Linux? I have downloaded Linux Mint 18 to use as a DVD boot if that is the right way to go.

Also, I want to use a Seagate ST6000DX000 for this. I bought two drives so I could do my monthly back up. Does anyone have data on this drive being good, bad, reliable or unreliable?

Thanks,

In theory, this isn't too bad. You'd create three subdirectories on the new drive, then do a deep copy of everything from your three source drives to the three subdirectories on the new one. That might be as simple as select-all-drag-drop.

At that point, you've now got the problem of convincing each old program that its data has moved to a new file path. I guess you're using Windows. You've got symbolic links, so if one of your old programs really, really knows where it wants to find its files, you can put a symbolic link there that points to the true location. (http://superuser.com/questions/1020821/how-to-create-a-symbolic-link-on-windows-10) The other trick is to assign a directory to a drive letter (http://lifehacker.com/267728/give-a-folder-its-very-own-drive-letter). That might be the easiest way to make the "new" environment pretend to be the old one.

I can't speak to the Seagate versus other drives. Just don't trust any one hard drive with anything. Backups, backups, backups!

Could always just create 3 partitions too but that's not very effective if the 3 x 2TB don't fill up evenly which is unlikely I expect.

SUBST still exists even in Windows 10 too if needed and you could h]just create three folders and SUBST drive letters. Edit: I see that's what one of links above says.

Back-ups. That's part of the reason why I want to do this. I have been doing Drive-to-External Drive back-ups with a sled every month. I have an even and odd set that I rotate between each month.

I thought if I got everything on one drive it would be easier and more reliable for operation and back-ups. The drives aren't getting any younger.

I tried to partition the big drive and backup to each partition,that didn't work very well. The tools usually like to backup drive-to-drive.

The real problem comes from Registry and pathing issues with install programs.

Thanks,

Ross

I'm not sure what registry issues you could come into contact with, unless you installed an application to one of the other drives, which I'd not recommend. It should be easy to update individual programs to save/open from a new location.

When I read your original post, I thought you were trying to do something different. I thought you wanted to make three physically separate disks look like one drive. I'm not even sure that's possible... maybe with symbolic links...

But if all you want to do is take three drives of data and turn them into one, it should be a simple matter of copy and paste. If one of them is your system drive, though, you'll need a clone tool to help you migrate to the new drive. I didn't see in your post whether this was the case.

I agree with Christian that partitioning doesn't make much sense. You're better off just making three folders to represent the three drives.

For most programs, when you open them up and they don't see the drive/folder they're used to saving to, they'll simply default to another folder, usually the default Windows user folders like Documents. From there you can choose whatever folder you want.

What is in the three 2TB drives? Would you be willing to share the root dir here? As Matt said, depending on the content of them, it may be more or less easy to do what you want to do.

I don't know, at present, but I'd guess the only drive that may require some more work is the one where "program files" and "users" directories are located, since those are the system directories that are mapped as system variables in the registry. And "windows" and others related to the OS install istelf, which for some reason I am assuming you have in some other drive, but, again, I do not know.

Ok, maybe I should more simply ask you this, to begin with: is your system drive any of those three 2TB drives, or is it a fourth drive?