Dynamic Disk Data Extraction ?

[Grommit]

Just had a old windows 2000 server crash on me and the slave drive is a dynamic disk... how can I get the disk to open up on another PC ?

[bossman]

@Grommit:

 

Did you have any data spanned across the 2 drives as you would need the first disk to recover that data as with dynamic disks there is a hidden database which tags the data spanned across the drives.

 

"A Dynamic disk is a physical disk that provides features the basic disks do not have, such as support for volumes spanning multiple disks. Dynamic disks use a hidden database to track information about dynamic volumes on the disk and other dynamic disks in the computer. Dynamic disk management is a data/Hard Disk management method on Microsoft Windows platforms, first introduced with Windows 2000 Operating System. The basic concept was put to use on UNIX platforms years earlier. There are five types of Dynamic volumes: Simple Volume, Striped Volume, Spanned Volume, Mirrored Volume, and RAID-5 Volume."

 

Have a look at this: Disk data recovery software,best hard Disk drive data recovery software

 

Hope this has been of help: :)

[bossman]

@Grommit:

 

Just found this at: recover unreadable dynamic disk - Page 2 - File and Hard Drive Recovery

 

My 200Gb slave disk, when moved to another PC came up as Dynamic Disk unreadable, and I didn't want to convert it to basic, as windows warns all data will be lost.

DiskPatch (Dos Application) will rebuild the partitioning information and disk will come back online as basic. All data intact!!!

Warning: For disks >137GB, make sure WinXP SP2 is installed or it won't be able to address some files and chkdsk will delete orphaned files. No data will be lost, it's just the pointers to the addresses. Simply install back in a WinXP SP2 machine and run chkdsk again to rebuild pointers.

 

Here's hoping, fingers crossed :)

[Michael]

If you install the hard drive into an XP Professional machine, within Computer Management > Disk Management, you should have the option of 'Import Foreign Disk'. You should then be able to view/copy data.

 

If it's part of a RAID setup, I would presume you'd have to install both hard drives and repeat the process. To be honest, I'm not a fan of software RAID and it can make restoring data a lot more hassle than hardware RAID.

If it's just a single disk, there is no real need to convert it to dynamic in most situations. Basic and dynamic drives perform the same, but dynamic gives administrators addition functions.