Allocating Raw Disk Space on Windows

You can configure raw disk space on Windows as a logical drive or physical drive. To find the drive letter or disk number, run the Disk Administrator. If the drives need to be striped (multiple physical disks combined into one logical disk), only logical drive specification would work.

You must be a member of the Informix-Admin group when you create a storage space or add a chunk. The raw disk space can be formatted or unformatted disk space.

To specify a logical drive

Assign a drive letter to the disk partition.
Specify the following value for ROOTDBS in the ONCONFIG file:
```
\\.\drive_letter
```
To create a storage space or add a chunk, specify the logical drive partition.
This example adds a chunk of 5000 kilobytes on the e: drive, at an offset of 5200 kilobytes, to dbspace dpspc3.
```
onspaces -a dbspc3 \\.\e: -o 5200 -s 5000
```

To specify a physical drive

If the disk partition has not been assigned a drive letter, specify the following value for ROOTDBS in the ONCONFIG file:
```
\\.\PhysicalDrive<number>
```
To create a storage space or add a chunk, specify the physical drive partition.
This example adds a chunk of 5000 kilobytes on PhysicalDrive0, at an offset of 5200 kilobytes, to dbspace dpspc3.
```
onspaces -a dbspc3 \\.\PhysicalDrive0 : -o 5200 -s 5000
```

Warning:

If you allocate a formatted drive or disk partition as raw disk space and it contains data, the database server overwrites the data when it begins to use the disk space. You must ensure that any data on raw disk space is expendable before you allocate the disk space to the database server.