Urgent ! Dynamic volume LOST !

[hyperwind]

People who have ever dipped into the mysterious jungle of
WinXP (2000) underlyings!..
Problem: That's on my essential physical drive that I had
2 partitions FAT32 (root & data, as usual). All was fine,
but it is likely Asmodee himself set me on fire of
experiment...
I converted phys. disk from basic to DYNAMIC. Then, a
thing happened to my OS (that's not important), I ran
fdisk in DOS mode, found 2 NON-DOS partitions (they were
seen as that 'cause they're on dynamic disk) and happily
deleted the first one (root), then formatted it to FAT32
and set up OS again (WinXP Pro (or 2000) there's no
difference for the case on). Root partition is, you get,
well visible. DATA partition (the 2nd one on DYNAMIC disk)
is not seen at all. AT ALL!
I'm searching for a kind soul who advises me how to
restore it (convert to a simple, basic, visible) WITHOUT
LOSING ANY INFORMATION (I know myself how to lose it
It contains the work of my life: source sound(kind of
composer, 2 albums laid down), texts (e-library, my own_
etc. Please don't joke around backups...

 

[shura]

It seems that your original basic disk had two primary partitions before conversation.
In this case the only thing you should to do is to restore only ONE byte in corresponding slot in MBR.

It can be done in two ways:
- Use Paragon Partition Manager (even demo version) to change "partition id" from 0x42 to 0xB or 0xC
http://www.partition-manager.com/home/personal/demo.htm

- Use any diskeditor (f.e. DOS DE from Norton, Windows Dskprobe), open the first sector of your disk.
Find at locations 0x1C2, 0x1D2, 0x1E2 or 0x1F2 byte 0x42 and change it to 0x0B or 0x0C.

 

[Bjorn Landemoo]

hyperwind

In addition to what "shura" says, this MS Knowledge Base article might help
you:

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

Best regards

Bjorn