need help with dynamic disk and external enclosure

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Rix2357

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 15, 2001
Messages
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In a rush to leave the country (not for criminal reasons) and bring all my data with me, I made a couple of mistakes, but now I wish to see if there is a remedy for it.

I had a 750GB SATA seagate drive connected to my computer in the U.S. newly partitioned and formatted. However, my mistake was in making that disk a dynamic disk. I thought I had kept it as basic, but I can't verify whether it was dynamic or a basic disk.

Now I'm in Taiwan and I just got a coolermaster external enclosure. It works for SATA drives and has either USB or eSATA connection options to the computer. Whenever I connect it to my laptop which I brought with me, I get a foreign disk error in disk management. According to documentation I should have been able to right click on the drive and a choice would be to import a dynamic disk.

However, that option is not available to me because I get a message going on the lines of saying that my computer does not support dynamic disks....I'm using WinXP Pro on my laptop so this shouldn't be the case. I am stumped as to what to do next.
 
Firewire and USB do not support dynamic discs, so the options are hidden, there is a "hack" to get firewire drives, but i have not tried, so use at your own risk... Here is a link... I see this, and am thinking that their is no way that the OS knows it is on a laptop, unless it was loaded with laptop power settings and/or other settings..... so this "should" hopefully work for ya...

"NOTE: Dynamic disks are not supported on portable computers or Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition."

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299598
 
actually reading up on it some more, I've come to the conclusion that external enclosures and dynamic disk drives just won't work. I'm not sure if this is due to the OS detecting that the drives are removeable and not allowing it.

What I really want to know is if I find a computer with native sata ports and setup without ahci mode meaning regular ide mode and I connect this hard drive to that computer will I then have an option in disk management to "import dynamic disk". If so then I can proceed to just copy the data off of it and then format and redo it as a basic disk again.

Hope someone can chime in on their experience. I still want to keep my data so I'd like to stay on the safe side of doing anything that could make a permanent modification to the disk.
 
yes, if you move the drive to a native I/O, it will allow you to import it, basicly, you are "mounting" it. and it should be fine, i just moved my home file server with 14 dynamic discs over to a new motherboard after the old failed and after the hardware installed, all i had to was import, and click reactivate and they raid arrays and single drives were working great!!
 
Cool someone with experience with this! Now my only problem is finding a non outdated computer in this country that makes the world's supply of motherboard.

It isn't so great here in Taiwan if people are wondering about the computer scene.....I can kiss goodbye awesome scythe, thermalright, and Tt heatpipe heatsinks. Prices are also ungodly expensive here and the top stuff is never in stock sometimes. My stupid 750gb seagate's which I bought months ago is absolutely unheard of here :). Oh, and a/c is necessary but not as strong as in the states......electricity prices here are about 50% higher than in the states. I'm not sure if I even want to build a decent powered rig right now because of it being a room furnance in the summer.
 
One thing you may consider, is buying a PCMIA SATA 1 or 2 card, then you should be able to plug in via eSATA/SATA and the drives will be seen in XP Pro as SCSI, which means all dynamic discs options work great:)

Yucky, high priced computer parts and high cost power, not good [h]ard people!!!!
 
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