How to install Windows on a spanned volume?

Snowwie

New Member
Okay, this is the problem I have. For YEARS I had 4 external drives of 640GB each. All these drives functioned as backup drives for my main backup for my personal stuff. Besides these 4 drives I have a server on which I keep one big encrypted volume, one on my main pc and one on a 2TB loose hard drive I keep 'offsite' in the trunk of my car (well protected and moisture free).

I came to a point that my date exceeded the maximum capacity of those 4 drives. I bought a second hand quad core machine, a Q6600, and according to the seller it has 4 sata ports, so I was thinking, well, if I use that computer, put the drives in there, and make a 2 sets of 2 spanned volumes then I have 2 x ~1.2TB available again, which is more than enough.

Except I am running into the issue where to install Windows. Because I noticed that when I install Windows on a 100GB partition, that the remaining space on that drive WILL NOT be spanned with another single drive, probably because they get dynamic. Is there any way to circumvent this problem? I also checked out the bios but sadly enough it has no raid support, otherwise I would just dumped 4 drives in 2 sets of raid0 and be done with it. Another option (but of course these problems always come on a Saturday evening, in which the stores are already closed and ordering will last till Tuesday before you have it, that sucks), will be to buy a simple sata controller to get myself 2 extra sata ports so I can add a cheap-ass ssd for Windows alone. But this all will costs extra money which I don't want to spend, I can spend it, it's not a matter of lack of money, but I choose to buy this computer (costed me 40 euro) instead of buying 4 new 1TB drives (which would have costed me 240 euro), or if had stuck with just two 1TB drives, then still around 85 euro including transport.

Anyway, there is no raid support in the bios of this machine, I have 4 sata ports and I want 2 spanned volumes using each 2 hard drive of 640GB. But where and how to put Windows?
 
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