In a recent discussion with some other IT people over an issue with a drive that had run out of space I discovered that there is some confusion around what you can actually do with Windows 2003 to expand drives.
After some research (with websites providing both good and bad information) I have come to believe these are the facts:
If you have Windows 2003 install on a machine you can expand or span a volume if:
1) The drive was not a basic partition and was not upgraded from Windows 2000. If the drive started life as a Windows 2003 basic partition you can covert the disk to a dynamic disk and then extend the volume across other drives. However, you cannot do this if the machine was a Windows 2000 server that was upgraded.
2) You can expand a basic partition as long as there is continuous free space. So if you have a C and a D drive on a hard disk and they take up 1/2 of the space and you want to extend the D drive, you can do so as long as the open space is the next available space on the disk.
3) Any drive that started its life as a dynamic volume can be manipulated in any way.
4) If needed, you can convert a dynamic disk to a basic disk; but you will have to blow away all the volumes on that disk. You cannot convert volumes to partitions (that bit is a one way street).
5) Your partition or volume must be NTFS. You just can't roll with FAT.
I have found some articles out there that will tell you that it is not possible to upgrade a basic partition and then expand it. This is true in Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This limitation has been removed in Windows 2003.
The exceptions to this rule are in the cases that you cannot create dynamic drives, which you will find in laptops and removable media. Dynamic drives are just cranky like that.
