Recovering Dynamic Disk

[Matt Urbanowski]

Hi all,
I had 2 disks in my computer, a normal one with OS etc on, and a data
one.
When I set up the data one, little did I realize I was creating a
'dynamic disk'.

Unfortunately, the other day, my first hard drive crashed and I've
lost the boot sector etc on it so I've reinstalled Windows on it.

Is there any easy / safe / cheap way to recover the data on the second
hard disk as I'm no longer able to access it? I've tried a few data
recovery software but they can't find anything. I tried the demo for a
product called DataRecoveryUK and it seemed to find everything but it
costs 70 quid to buy which is loads!

Perhaps someone knows a way to recover the data without risking losing
it. To me it just seems like I need to redefine the boot sector for
the partitions on it which doesn't sound like much.

Thanks in advance,
Matt

 

[Anna]

Hi all,
I had 2 disks in my computer, a normal one with OS etc on, and a data
one.
When I set up the data one, little did I realize I was creating a
'dynamic disk'.

Unfortunately, the other day, my first hard drive crashed and I've
lost the boot sector etc on it so I've reinstalled Windows on it.

Is there any easy / safe / cheap way to recover the data on the second
hard disk as I'm no longer able to access it? I've tried a few data
recovery software but they can't find anything. I tried the demo for a
product called DataRecoveryUK and it seemed to find everything but it
costs 70 quid to buy which is loads!

Perhaps someone knows a way to recover the data without risking losing
it. To me it just seems like I need to redefine the boot sector for
the partitions on it which doesn't sound like much.

Thanks in advance,
Matt

Matt:
I assume the problem arose because the OS is the XP Home Ed. As such, this
edition of the XP OS cannot access data on a dynamic disk, which it
considers "foreign".

Anyway, 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, in general, the
accepted workaround is to reinstall the disk in whatever OS, e.g., XP
Professional, supports dynamic disks and retrieve whatever data you can
through copying/moving the data to other media. Hopefully you have access to
a machine with the XP Pro OS to accomplish this. That would be your best
recourse if practical (assuming the problem results from the fact that
you're currently using the XP Home Ed. as your OS).

But it's an iffy situation in our experience. (I haven't accessed the above
links in some time so I'm not entirely sure those URLs are current.)

See also http://www.theeldergeek.com/hard_drives_10.htm for additional 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
Anna