Dynamic disk unreadable

[Sundeep]

Hi,
I have two internal hard disks installed of which one (80GB) contains the operating system and the other (160GB) which I use to store all my critical data. Couple of days back I had to format my first hard disk as Windows had become corrupt. After formatting I installed Windows XP again and all worked fine. But when i opened Windows Explorer i could not see my other hard disk (160 GB). This hard disk was a Dynamic disk. I did some research and found that this problem could occur when XP was reinstalled and I applied the following solution,

1) Install dskprobe.exe on the system.
2) Run dskprobe.exe on the system.
3) Select the Drives menu and "Physical Drive. . ."
4) Double click on the drive that you want to convert back to a basic disk. Click the "Set Active" button next to that drive.
5) From the Sectors menu, select "Read"
6) Accept the defaults (begin sector 0, read 1 sector) and click "Read"
7) In the editor, go to the "01C0" line and the third bit should be a "42". Change that to a "07".
8) From the Sectors menu, select "Write". Confirm all dialog boxes.
9) Exit dskprobe.exe. Reboot. The disk should now appear.

This too worked fine but my problem got only half solved. The dynamic disk had two partitions. After applying the above solution, only the first partition is visible. I cannot see the other partition which actually is a much larger one and contains lot of critical data. Can anyone please help?

 

[Edison]

I had a similar problem. I was told to unplug the 'invisible' drive and boot up. Then power off, plug it in again and power up again. For some reason it was there again. I hope its as simple for you as it was for me!

I know in admin tools you can access Computer Management and that maybe able to resolve it for you. I would personally prefer to give the disc to someone and get them to copy the data off though and then just reformat via computer management in the usual way. Good luck

 

[Covenant]

Welcome to PC Review.

I hop I'm incorrect but as far as I was aware you can't convert a dynamic disk back to a basic disk without data loss.
Before attempting any more repairs I suggest your next step is to use something like Paragon hard drive manager (Given away on May's Computer Shopper) to see if you can view the partition and copy the data over to to a safe place.
Covenanthttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/236086/