I have two IDE drives in my machine that I have converted to dynamic disks and did a striped volume on it. I was wondering if I reformatted the computer would the drives still be in the striped configuration or will it break the set? I want to use the IDEs for backup and keep my SATA drives for OS uses.
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Windows Dynamic Disk RAID
- Thread starter danimal
- Start date
If you reformatted just your Windows drive then you wouldn't have to. If you reformat the striped drives you'll obviously be erasing the information that says they're striped so you'll lose the array unless you use a formatting utility that recognizes Windows dynamic disks. I'm not aware of any that work with dynamic disks.
Yikes, misinformation.neo86 said:
It's stored at the last MB of the disk, which is why there's a funky 8MB of unallocated space when you setup a drive in Windows... Now if you remove all partition information via fdisk or other means then yeah, the dynamic disk informaiton is gone.
But yeah, it's stored on the disk and shouldn't be a problem to migrate. Technically it's feasible but be sure to back up your data first. I'd post links to my experiences with dynamic disks but they aren't on this forum. I don't recommend just "winging it." Always back up first.
Do NOT use the Windows XP setup program to delete or create partitions on a dynamic disk!! You may format volumes, but do NOT create or delete partitions. What happens if you do so is it erases the pointer to the dynamic disk metadatabase and creates a conventional MBR on the disk, making any dynamic volumes on the disk inaccessible. It is possible to use diskpart to unhose the volume if you make this mistake, but it's still a bad day for you if you have to resort to this.
You can format just fine with dynamic disks, but nuking and paving any partitions (aka volumes with dynamic disks) will render the disk unusable unless you do perform some magic like DougLite said, or you follow the instructions and don't fiddle with it in the first place.neo86 said:How so?
