dynamic disk file recovery

[Bill G.]

Hello,

I have a server running windows 2000. It has a scsi
adaptec card with two physical hard drives. These two
drives are DYNAMIC disks. The "c" drive is the system,
boot drive which is mirror across both physical drives
via windows 2000 server (software). There is a second
partition "d" which is also mirror over both physical
drives. (C, D are on the SAME physical DRIVE) The data I
need to KEEP is on "D"

I can NOT delete "C" in setup without getting an error
message stating as much as "this disk is a dynamic disk,
if you delete this partitions, other partitions will be
inaccessiable. If you wish to keep access to these other
partitions, do not proceed with this option, press ESC,
etc" (words to that effect)

One problem I have is that I am not real clear on how
dynamic disks will complicate what otherwise would be a
fairly simple proceedure. The Simple procedure being the
moving "D's" DATA partition, using another machine if
necessary, without losing anything. Can I simple take one
of the boot disks (with C, and D in the mirrored set),
put it in another system (windows XP pro machine) and
copy the data to a safe drive? Are dynamic disk readable
in Windows XP Professional?

Background: What happened was the server crashed to a
blue screen. The blue screen
reports "boot_device_inaccessiable" the user/admin told
us that he notice some of the other physical attached
drives were missing from his "my computer." (these drives
are no longer physicall attached to the system) But at
the time he rebooted and this boot_device_inaccessiable
is the error/blue screen he gets. So we tried to do a
clean install (by formating the "c" partition only) and
after the files get copied to hard drive and reboots, the
SAME error appears.

We tested the hardware, and feel pretty good the hardware
is working as it should. Our next step is to delete both
partitions and do a true clean install to a single BASIC
disk.

So the question is can I take one of these mirror Dynamic
disks after this boot process is complete and READ/Move
the data to the BASIC disk?

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

Bill

Reinstalling on dynamic disks, and deleting/recreating a volume during
this, is one of the most common reasons why people loose data from dynamic
disks.

Those two MS Knowledge Base articles explains more:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=227364

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=236086

You might be able to use "Reactivate Volume" and "Import Foreign Disk"
described in this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=222189

Best regards

Bjorn