Ever had the need to turn a dynamic disk into a basic disk, perhaps to install an OS on it, and did not want to have the entire data on it erased? It’s actually kind of dumb that you can convert basic drives to dynamic drives without data alteration, but not the other way around. Sadly, as of currently there are still no programs capable of converting a dynamic disk back to basic without it implying destruction of all data. However, there is one rather unorthodox way to do it, albeit it is a bit dodgey…
It was way back on XP almost two years ago that I had converted one of my harddrives to dynamic because it was the only way to disable file caching, which I needed to do because of Delayed Write Failed errors resulting from a Norton GoBack driver issue. And sadly, as I fiddled with my computer many times, I found it would have been very easy on me if I could have used that drive as a system drive a couple of times. Well what happened was that a few months ago during a few dataloss debacles ironically, but not surprisingly related to data recovery software Acronis TrueImage 10 I ended up screwing up TWO of my three drives’ partitions at the same time. What I did next I’ll let it up to you to decide wether it was good, bad, or just plain stupid.
I had a boot floppy with Partition Table Doctor on it, and I used that to restore one of the drives. I couldn’t restore the other because Vista had very “smartly” created a new partition on it on a previous boot, but I decided to give it a go anyway. Guess what I did? I ran a scan on the drive to see if it can find any traces of a lost partition and try to restore it. THE WRONG DRIVE THAT IS. I knew since back then that depending on how partitions are activated and where the OS is that drive letters can change. Sadly, at the moment of my decision, and throughout the process, my brain was vacant. So at the end I selected “fix” and let it do whatever it knew best. And just like that, I messed up the partition on my dynamic drive. Horray!
When I discovered my blunder I was already reinstalling Vista on one of my drives. Then, as soon as I got into the OS, I used Active@ Partition Recovery on my crippled drive. Sure enough, it found the partition and restored it. I was prompted for a restart. Only a bit later on did I look at the Disk Management utility and what did I see? Drive D’s partition was showing up as blue instead of brownish-green?! Whoa, when did that happen? Well, here’s what happened: when I ran that scan, I was asked if the existing partition on the drive should be erased to restore the “recovered” one. In selecting yes I accidentally deleted the working, dynamic partition on the drive. Note that the partition was DELETED, not FORMATTED. The most visible difference between the two is that partition deletion only takes half a second while formatting takes much longer. What is done is that the partition table is deleted. All the data remains on the drive, but the system no longer sees it because no partitions are filed in the drive metadata. This is similar to deleting a file: the file’s data remains on the drive, but is no longer registered in the file table. This is why recovery software works, and it will work until or unless you overwrite that data with something else. In the case of my drive it wasn’t re-partitioned, so all the information was still there. When I used Active@ Partition Recovery, the drive was scanned, and, quite quickly, the program found that there had been a deleted partition on the disk. Because no data was ever written onto the disk afterwards, the program quickly and successfully did a 100% recovery of my data. We’re talking over 50,000 files here, all integrally restored, without one byte of data loss. But there was something more that happened during the recovery. When the partition was recovered by Active@ it was rebuilt as a BASIC partition! Please note that I only had ONE partition on the drive, so I cannot say what would have happened in a situation involving multiple partitions.
Summary:
Doing this is not recommended, but should you for any reason want to, or become compelled to convert a dynamic partition back to basic without migrating the data on it and yet still keeping it, here are the two simple, and quick steps which you have to perform:
-delete the dynamic partition on the drive
-recover said erased partition with a recovery program
This will make the partition be “reborn” while still containing all of its data, but lose its dynamic property in the process, and be converted back to basic.
Warning:
-Deleting and formatting are NOT the same thing; while deleting will only raise a superficial flag that the partition no longer exists a format will completly overwrite the data on the drive, resulting in a difficult and incomplete recovery of data and nigh-impossible odds of partition recovery. A delete is something that you can do from Disk Management or the Vista/XP boot media(the option is called “erase partition” on the Vista DVD).
-Your recovery success rate depends almost entirely on what software you use; Partition Table Doctor 3.0 is freeware, 3.5+ is shareware. PTD also allows you to “preview” what the recovered drive’s partition will look like before saving any changes to the drive, and it is very recommended to use software which can perform the recovery virtually and show you the results before actually modifying anything to the drive. Remember, unless you know what you’re doing any writes to the drive could overwrite your data. If you are seeing the old label of your partition after its virtual recovery attempt, I believe you may confidently save changes made to the disk.
-Make sure there is nothing to make the system attempt to re-partition the drive in case a restart is required after deletion. This will severely affect your chances of data retrieval, and you may end up being able to recover a nearly 100% of the data but not the whole of it and be unable to rebuild the partition.
-This method has been used with success by me, on my system configuration. I offer no warranty whatsoever that it will work in other environments, partition configurations, or any other circumstances and therefor take no responsibility for any negative outcomes including, but not limited to, irreversible data loss. You have been warned.
That having been said, I wish you good luck and hope that my experience will prove useful to all you who have encountered this nuissance.