Al said:
Hey all, I recently formatted my system and reinstalled windows...now when
I
plug in my slave drive it doesnt show up, and in Computer Management it
appears with an error and says "Dynamic" and "Foreign". It's NTFS format.
Any idea how I can rescue it? there's literally 300Gig of irreplacable
information on it.
Thanks for any help
Al:
Are you running the Home Ed. of XP? If so, that might account for the
problem you're experiencing. As such, this version of the XP OS cannot
access data on a dynamic (foreign) disk. Most likely that drive was
mistakenly originally created as a "dynamic" disk - instead of a "basic"
disk when you installed it in your present system or in a previous OS. While
there are situations where a HDD should be created as a "dynamic" disk, it's
a relatively rare situation for most users where this is necessary.
In any event, the Home Ed. of XP cannot access data on a dynamic disk. It
"sees" the disk as "foreign". You can, however, convert the disk to a
"Basic" disk in your present system but that would result in the total loss
of data which, of course, you cannot tolerate.
Anyway, assuming that this *is* the problem...
There is no simple conversion process that I'm aware of that will return the
dynamic disk to a basic disk so that the contents of the drive would be
accessed by your present OS. The usual conversion process - see
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;309044&sd=tech will
result in the deletion of all data on the disk.
There have been some published hacks that supposedly can convert a dynamic
disk to a basic disk without the loss of data - see
http://thelazyadmin.com/index.php?/archives/161-Converting-Dynamic-Disks-Back-to-Basic-Disks.html
and
http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1806 .
But, in general, the accepted workaround is to reinstall the disk in
whatever OS, e.g., XP Professional, supports dynamic disks and retrieve
whatever data you can through copying/moving the data to other media.
Hopefully you have or can gain access to a machine with the XP Pro OS to
accomplish this.
See also
http://www.theeldergeek.com/hard_drives_10.htm for additional info
concerning dynamic disks, and take a look at "How to Use Disk Management to
Configure Dynamic Disks in Windows XP"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308424/en-us#EQACAAA
In Disk Management, simply right-click on the drive (the area where the disk
is shown as "Dynamic") and select the "Convert to Basic Disk" from the
sub-menu that opens. Understand that when you do this, all data on the disk
will be lost - the data will be destroyed. The disk will then be reflected
as "Unallocated" and you can then go ahead with partitioning/formatting it
in Disk Management.
Anna
P.S.
The above info comes from my notes which are somewhat old but I'm pretty
sure the info provided is correct. However, I haven't checked the links I've
indicated above in some time. Hopefully they're still active and accessible.
