Dynamic Disk Unreadable

[Chad Cameron]

Hi All,

I have a hardrive. It is partitioned into 3 drives, C, D & E. Drive C has
the OS installed on it. I ran out of room, so I bought a new harddrive.

I used the Disk Manager to partition the drive. It is Dynamic with
partitions H, J & K (I think).
Later, I had to format drive C and reinstall XP Pro.

Now, I cannot access my newer harddrive, it is 'Unreadable'.

My biggest problem, is that there is about 150Gig of data on that drive, so
if I even recover it I cannot put it anywhere.

Basically, I need to get access to the newer harddrive, no if's and's or
but's.
Can I get my data back?

Chad

 

[Richard Urban]

Well, if you need access to the information no ifs, ands or buts, as you
say, I would certainly make a disk image of the drive before I tried
"anything" on it at all. If you have an image, and you screw up big time in
trying to get to the files, at least you can restore the image and try
again.

But, you need the software to create the image and you need somewhere to
place the image when you create it. An external drive, equal to the size of
the drive you intend to image, will do just fine.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[JS]

Converting Dynamic to Basic disk:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309044/en-us

JS

 

[Chad Cameron]

Do you know what even happened? It was working fine, then I reinstalled XP
and now I cannot. I wasn't even dealing with this harddrive? Is it an XP
problem, or a harddrive problem. Can I put the harddrive in another
computer and get access to it?
Chad

 

[Chad Cameron]

I have read that doing this will destroy all data on the drive
Yes/No

 

[Guest]

Yes, it needs to be empty first. XP is the only system that can read a
dynamic disk
I always convert to basic before formatting and saving any data to the hd.

 

[Richard Urban]

Look at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/maintain/operate/10w2kadb.mspx

Specifically, read the paragraph on how to reactivate dynamic disks.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Chad Cameron]

This link really only talks about things that I cannot no longer fix.
(Things I had to do before reformating my main drive

To reactivate, the drive has to be in a state other then unreadable.

 

[Chad Cameron]

Am I wrong, or is a dynamic drive totally useless if it needs to be moved?
Once I fix the problem, should I switch to Basic instead of Dynamic?

Thanks everyone for you help so far
Chad

 

[Chad Cameron]

SOOOOOO,

At work I have a computer that is running XP Pro. It has the available
drive space I need. What do I need to make an image and get it to the other
computer?

Then what do I have to do to try to recover my drive.

 

[Airman Thunderbird]

Have you tried this?:

To reactivate a missing or offline disk, perform the following steps:

Open Disk Management.

Right-click the Offline disk whose status is missing and then click
Reactivate Disk.

The disk should be titled Online after the disk is reactivated.

 

[Guest]

no it's not useless, however before you move to another system it must be
marked as healthy and readable, dynamic is more fault tolerant, but requires
more prep before moving to another system, and or reading by another system.
since I dual boot, I prefer basic type as both win 2000 pro and xp can read
the volume.

 

[Chad Cameron]

I fixed the problem.

I put the drive into another XP computer. It came up Foreign. I imported
the volume table, and it worked fine. I then put it back into my computer.
Again it came up Foreign, so I imported the table, everything is good.

FYI
Chad