Converting dual-boot NTFS basic disk to dynamic disk

[Darrick West]

I have a single drive partitioned for dual-booting to Win2K, or XP Pro -
both with NTFS. The drive also has several NTFS, and one FAT32 partition
for data. I'd like to convert this basic disk to a dynamic disk. However,
I don't know how this will affect the boot up process. My boot
partition(D is on XP Pro, and my system partition(C is on Win2K as
reported by the disk management snap-in.

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Darrick

Don't upgrade the disk to dynamic in this situation. When you do this, only
the current operating system partitions (boot and system partitions) will
keep it's partition table entries intact. Other partitions will not be
usable as boot partitions because the Filesystem ID fields are changed,
rendering the other operating system unbootable.

It might work if you do the conversion from XP, as both your XP boot
partition and XP system partition - where the later also is your Win2000
boot and system partition - would keep the FIlesystem ID field. However,
according to this web site, separate hard disks are recommended:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/administration/management/mltiboot.asp

Why do you want to convert the disk to dynamic? Most dynamic disk functions
are disabled on volumes that ever existed as partitions on a basic disk.

Best regards

Bjorn