Willo said:
Hi;
a customer ran defrag on his windows XP pro system, he has two hard
drives, master/boot disk is 40gb set as a basic disk, the slave disk is a
160Gb hard drive set as a dynamic disk.
Now, we can't access the 160Gb hard drive, the computer's bios detect it,
but we cant see the unit on "My computer". The Disc Manager, shows it as
a "dynamic unreadable".
I dont want to try to convert it to a "basic" disk, because im not sure if
that will make it to lost all the information.
Any advice?
Willo:
From your description of events it would seem that something went awry with
the defragmentation process to cause this problem We're assuming - as I
guess you are - that there was no drive recognition problem prior to the
defragging operation.
Since this is an XP Pro OS, in theory there should be no problem along the
lines you describe.
No doubt you've checked the connection/configuration of the problem disk and
all's well there, right? In case you haven't done so and notwithstanding the
fact that the drive is detected by the BIOS, you should still check it out
with a HDD diagnostic utility.
As a long shot, try Disk Management > Action > Rescan Disks.
I assume you've also tried installing that secondary HDD in another XP Pro
machine, right?
There have been some published hacks that supposedly can convert a dynamic
disk to a basic disk without the loss of data - see
http://thelazyadmin.com/index.php?/archives/161-Converting-Dynamic-Disks-Back-to-Basic-Disks.html
and
http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1806 . But since the XP Pro
edition should have no dynamic disk recognition limitation I don't know if
the conversion process - even if it did work (which I doubt) - would be of
any value here. In any event, should you decide to go that route you should
first disk clone or disk image the problem HDD.
See also
http://www.theeldergeek.com/hard_drives_10.htm for additional
background info concerning dynamic disks, and take a look at "How to Use
Disk Management to Configure Dynamic Disks in Windows XP"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308424/en-us#EQACAAA
And, of course, I'm sure you're familiar with the possibility of using one
or more of those data recovery programs that purport to recover
"unrecoverable" data.
Anna
