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Under Windows, is there a way to create a virtual device recognized as a disk drive, which would map to a single partition on a physical drive? It is my understanding that Windows doesn't treat all block devices equally; partitions are not accessed like drives.
I'd like to avoid creation of a virtual device from a disk image file, as this may result in additional filesystem overhead. I'm aware of OSFMount which mounts image files, and which seems to even quote support for dynamic disks.
One of the things this would hypothetically allow is the creation of an additional GPT or MBR partition table, and conversion of this disk into a 'dynamic' disk, letting me leverage Windows' software RAID. I did not find a way to make use of a single partition to store dynamic disks, so this seems like a possible way to hack it with minimal overhead.
FWIW, I'm running Windows 8.1 on the relevant machine.