I have a 160GB hard drive that is a dynamic disk from when I used win2k. I've heard that you can't use dynamic disks on other platforms and other bad things involving data security and such. I know that there are "very few reasons to use dynamic disks" so I just want to make it a normal disk, and not dynamic. Is there a way to do this? I may move it to a linux box eventually...
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Converting FROM dynamic disks?
- Thread starter Ugly_Jim
- Start date
Snugglebear
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2001
- Messages
- 11,436
Not without wiping your data. Conversion to dynamic disk changes the whole partition structure for good and moving back requires you to wipe that out. My personal preference is just to do a zerofill to eliminate the dynamic disk droppings and start over from scratch, creating a basic volume. Of course the preferrable course of action is just not to use dynamic disks.
I
Ice Czar
Guest
Ugly_Jim said:I have a 160GB hard drive that is a dynamic disk from when I used win2k. I've heard that you can't use dynamic disks on other platforms and other bad things involving data security and such. I know that there are "very few reasons to use dynamic disks" so I just want to make it a normal disk, and not dynamic. Is there a way to do this? I may move it to a linux box eventually...
for money yes
http://www.partition-manager.com/
will revert a simple volume and retain the data, however software RAID your still out of luck
ID 1410: Reverting Dynamic Disks into Basic ones
Q: Can I convert a Dynamic disk with Spanned or Striped volumes into a Basic Disk?
A: No, you cannot. Partition Manager can convert only Dynamic Disks with Simple volumes which consists of a single region
ID 1421: Support of Dynamic Disks
Q: Does Paragon Partition Manager support Windows 2000 dynamic disks?
A: Partition Manager can revert from a Dynamic disk into a Basic one. All other operations are not supported.
I searched forever on this a while back. I had a 120gig disk partitioned with that dynamic bullshit under windows xp. Then I switched to linux. I could read the 120gig partition, but I couldn't do a damn thing with it. I tried partition magic but nothing I did in it would do anything. I finally got a new hard drive(actually my girlfriend got it for me) and I partitioned it correctly(and formatted with ext3 all around). I copied all the stuff from the dynamic piece of shit over to the new drive and then wiped the disk with the dynamic horeshit.