Convert dynamic disk to basic without data loss ??

Hi

I tried to post this to another thread but the thread was too old, https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=191006, my apologies if I am trawling up old 'chestnuts' here. my problem is thus, I have installed Windows Vista home premium to a new PC and have fitted 2 x 180gb sata disk drives from my old PC that was running under Windows XP Pro. The disks are there under vista's disk management but are 'Dynamic' disks and cannot be accesed under Vista without converting to 'Basic' disks and are status labeled 'invalid' these are disks 1 and 3. Sorry if the images are poor. There is an option to convert to basic disk but it wipes the disk completly.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v516/Pikey100/disk/properties.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v516/Pikey100/disk/Disks.jpg

I need to convert these two disks to basic disks without damaging the data stored on them. I am not used to messing with hard drives so please bear with me on this one. It may be that it is an impossibility in which case please excuse my ignorance

The thread I was trying to post to recommended using a hex editor called HdX editor with excellent instruction on how it should be done by changing sector 0 location 1C2 from 42 to 7. However when I looked that sector location it was already set at 7 so that put out my bonfire straight away.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v516/Pikey100/disk/CaptureHxD.jpg

I dare say that I could put the disks back into the old pc and transfer them to the new pc's hard disk via usb or some other cable but I dread to think how long it would take to shift 369gb of data and if I could get vista to read the disks in situ that would be my favoured option. I hope this is enough info.

Ta in advance

Titus

 

you can convert basic to dynamic without data loss (as long as there is 1mb spare)
you cant convert dynamic to basic without losing data.. (unless you back it up first)

 

Thanks for your reply KC

I kind of guessed I was onto a loser with this one.

Titus

 

You can convert dynamic disk back to basic disk without losing data....

There are some free utilities.....you seem to have found the "unsupported" but still documented by Microsoft method using DSKPROBE.EXE
http://thelazyadmin.com/blogs/thela...erting-Dynamic-Disks-Back-to-Basic-Disks.aspx


There is another free utility referred to in this article..TestDisk
http://mypkb.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/how-to-non-destructively-convert-dynamic-disks-to-basic-disks/

Alas...if you don't feel like rolling up your sleeves and getting dirty with the above methods.....you can turn to 3rd party disk management utilities which will support doing this. I'm not sure if Acronis has a version of their software which does this, or if Symantec has a version of their software which does this...but just a couple of weeks ago I had to do this on a clients Small Business 2003 r2 server..which had all dynamic disks on its hardware RAID array. I used paragon Softwares package on it..worked very well.

 

I can see that you are familiar with this kind of problem. Please, please try to help me. Here is my confusion:

I have a laptop and one 3.5 inch SATA II hard drive (250Gb) that is in a Digitus external drive that is hooked up with a USB connection to my laptop. It's full of data that has been collected for a very long time.
The problem is next: the hard WAS in dynamic mode and every time I entered Win XP Pro I had to go to Computer Managment to Reactivate it so the Win XP could recognized it(to be readable).
And then last time I accidentaly pressed the wrong command in Computer Managment. Instead of Reactivate I pressed Convert to BAsic volume(I guess it was that). Stupid, stupid, stupid me. ;(

The Consequences: Now all of my data is unreadable, Disk is in BAsic mode and ONLINE and all of space is Unallocated. Don't know what to do. ;((

And one more thing. After doing some reading online I was waiting for a reply on one forum, I waited a bit long and was totally disapointed by the situation and I tried to fix the problem myself. I used "Testdisk-6.10.win" The result was that now I have one part of the disk in Unallocated(about 200Gb) and about 32Gb in f**k(I don't know mode). I tried a program called Rcover My Files 3... and he listed all the files(I hope so) that were on the drive. I think he can save them and I can backup up it to a DVD or... but if this problem could be resolved by an intervention on Hard Disk it's self it would be an enormous relief.

Please, please, please help. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

BTW Sorry if my English is bad, I'm not domestic.