Dynamic Drive to Basic Drive?

Joined
Mar 19, 2005
Messages
34
Hi all.

I feel like a total dolt and hope someone here can help me.

I recently fitted a new PC together and was taking my old HDD's and fitting them in the new box.

I had two 30gb drives Raid 0'd together and because they were getting a bit long in the tooth, I thought I'd move the data onto a new 200gb sata drive and wipe the disks / treat them individually (fearing hd failure within the next year).

Now... (and here is where I start to look stupid)

I get windows xp running off an old disk (one of 5 in the box)

I notice that the SATA drive isn't there.

I look in disk management and see my 200gb drive represented as a 130ish gb one that needs 'initializing' - at that point I hadn't read the "answers" sticky so actually thought it was some bug - but I'm under pressure to work work work just now so I figured I'd just go with the flow.

It offered to make this new 130gb drive dynamic or basic. I commited the mortal sin of choosing without figuring out what the heck the difference was and I chose dynamic (because it sounded cooler). This is where you can feel free to pour your scorn on me.

Anyway.

Long story short, I'm running windows on the Sata Drive's 60ish gb partition (that XP found when installing) and I have wiped my old Raided drives and I now can't see the 130gb disk.

it's in the disk manager as a "dynamic drive" that is unreadable. Partition magic can't access it - if I ask windows to install on it, it says it'll have to convert it to basic disk and i'll lose my data.

so thats my quandry. I have 130gb of 'stuff' that I can't get because neither of the two windows installations left in this machine (one on an oooollld disk, one on the new sata disk) can access this drive.

Is there any way to get this drive mounted without buggering up the data?
 
What are your system's exact specs? You could need either a driver or BIOS adjustments.
 
P3 3.2
Mobo: ASUS: P5GD2
512 DDR2 533
whole bunch of disks... .the 200gb Sata is a Maxtor
Radeon X600XT card
XP Pro


The 60gb part of the disk is runnign windows xp but the 120gb bit doesn't appear in my computer - it only appears in bios etc.. (and when i pretend i'm installing xp it can find the partition and offers to wipe it, it doesn't offer to just install on it). it also appears in disk management console
 
I forget how you do it (I think you may have to use a hex editor) but it is possible to revert a dynamic disk (as long as there are no multi drive volumes on it, only a single simple volume) back to a basic disk by manually changing the partition type to conventional MBR rather than the dynamic database. This is of course not supported and is not guaranteed to work. My memory is quite fuzzy on this, you'll have to Google for more information.

However, every time I've had a Dynamic disk get boogered up like that, the outlook for the data on it has never been good.
 
DougLite said:
I forget how you do it (I think you may have to use a hex editor) but it is possible to revert a dynamic disk (as long as there are no multi drive volumes on it, only a single simple volume) back to a basic disk by manually changing the partition type to conventional MBR rather than the dynamic database. This is of course not supported and is not guaranteed to work. My memory is quite fuzzy on this, you'll have to Google for more information.

However, every time I've had a Dynamic disk get boogered up like that, the outlook for the data on it has never been good.

My ordeal was with five disks, all simple volumes. Needless to say they are all basic and will always be basic. It wasn't my configuration mistake either, I didn't build the server. :D




**************************************************

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO IMPLIED WARRANTY FOR THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION. IF YOU FUCK UP YOUR DISK, IT'S YOUR ASS/FAULT, NOT MINE.

**************************************************



To revert to a basic disk configuration from a dynamic situation, these are the steps you need to take. This is a TEMPORARY solution only.

Okay, you'll need the diskprobe utility. It's a part of the support tools on the 2000 Server disk.

You have to open up diskprobe. Select "Drives," then "Physical Drives." You have to select your drive here. "PhysicalDrive0" is your first drive, "PhysicalDrive1" is your second drive, so on and so forth. Double-click the drive. Under "Handle 0," you see your drive selected. There's a button there named "Set Active." Click it. Then click OK.

Click "Sectors" on the pull-down menu, then "Read." Click "Read" again in the window that pops up. You're Reading sectors 00 and 01. Now you should see the window populate the drive's sector information.

In row "01C0," and the third column over, you will see the data "42." Navigate to this block and change the "42" to "07." Click the "Sectors" pull down menu again. Click "Write." You will have to allow write access to the drive, so click Yes/Ok.

Click on "Drives," then "Physical Drives" again. "Close Handle" for the drive that you edited information on.

Reboot or load up the Disk Management console and import your drives. They will show up as foreign when you first view them, but that's perfectly fine.

Now get the data off of that drive, delete the partitions on said drive, and rebuild it.

That's it. Really.



I never noticed that I had to change from 42. Would have been more cryptic if it were 07 to 42. :)
 
I'll give it a shot.

I can't get the data just now anyway so if I bork it, I bork it.

Cheers for the tips, I'll let you konw how it goes...
 
have you tried accessing them with a direct sector scan?

trial File Scavenger and see what it can see
(to attempt rescue youd need to buy)
 
I used diskprobe as suggested above. It's part of XP tools as well as 2000 server.

Thankfully, that one change of 42 -> 7 did the trick and I was able to jump in there and grab all of the important data.

One question though.

In what way is this temporary?

After contenting myself that I had secured the data, I reboot a couple of times and asked partition magic to 'check for errors' the disk and it passes with flying colours and has been there after each reboot.
 
Simple, that configuration is not supported. You should back up the data and repartition and reformat the disks as soon as possible. That is the 100% safe way to recover from this little SNAFU.
 
DougLite said:
Simple, that configuration is not supported. You should back up the data and repartition and reformat the disks as soon as possible. That is the 100% safe way to recover from this little SNAFU.

Indeed. Not supported in any way.

I copied over 50GB of database data over a 100MB network after getting those volumes up to nuke and pave the disks. Then I had to copy it all back.

That was a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong 8 hours.

Glad to hear you got your data back! :)
 
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