Dynamic Disk Recovery:: IDEAS?

[Grok]

Ran into problems with a system, had to reformat C: and reinstall OS.  Prior to that, it looked like this:

Dynamic Disk 200GB IDE
(   [ C:  18GB ]   [ D: 40GB ] [E: 132GB ] )

Booting to the Win2000 Server CD, when I got to the partition screen, it scanned the partition table and recognized this:

[ unrecognized or damaged disk -- ] 18GB
[ unrecognized or damaged disk -- ] 40GB
[ unrecognized or damaged disk -- ] 132GB

So I deleted the first partition, reformatted as NTFS, and installed Win2000 Server, as normal.  Installed the service packs, ran all the patches, updates, etc.  Also installed all vendor drivers for the motherboard, video, NIC, etc.  All is well, except...

Now going into DiskMgmt.MSC,  (computer manager - drive manager), it still shows the 200GB as a Dynamic Disk, but says "Unreadable" with a Big Red X.

So, I ghosted the entire 200GB drive to another server before I began the following attempted recoveries.

All attempts to revert this to a basic disk (accompanied by the warning "you will lose all data on this drive") have failed.  I have tried to revert it several times, rebooted multiple times, no go.

Then I installed Winternals Administrators Pak, ran the Disk Commander.  It can properly see all the partitions, but shows something like this:

[ MBR ]
[ Primary Partition ]
[ Unused Space ]
[ Extended Partition X ]
[ Unrecognized Partition ]
[ Unused Space ]
[ Extended Partition ]
[ Unrecognized Partition ]
[ Unused Space ]

The two unrecognized partitions I have tried to "Salvage Files" from, but Disk Commander says it cannot read them.  However, when I used Ghost to save these images, it was reading all the files from disk, and the filenames in the damaged section were showing on the progress bar ... rather than just a sector-by-sector copy.

A lot to read, but if you think you know for certain how to recover the partitions, please let me know.

[MyndFyre]

Hrm...

If you were managing to image them - reading the file names, have you gotten your files onto another computer and been able to access them?  So -- is your problem then that you simply can't delete the other dynamic partitions?

You might try -- as archaic as this is -- back up, boot into DOS and use FDISK to delete the partitions entirely -- that is, the Dynamic Disk partition, because FDISK won't be able to see the others (IIRC).  You should then be able to repartition the drive with Windows and setting up your partitions again.

FYI : your title is "Dynamic Disk 200MB IDE.  That could be the problem

[Grok]

Oops, that should be 200GB.

Clarify #1)  Ghost runs from a boot disk and copies data from the drive and multicasts to the Ghost Server, saving the data to a .GHO file on that server.  It does not save files individually, and you cannot browse the files at the server, picking out which ones you want.  Your only option is to flash the entire .GHO back to the client.  Useless here, because I am already where that would put me.

Clarify #2)  The goal here is to recover the data from the 40GB and 132GB partitions into a normal, readable partition.  Right now I am unable to "manage' those partitions from Windows' Disk Manager.  However, Winternals can at least see the partitions, but it claims to be unable to read them.

I am thinking of using diskpart.exe to change the partition type to a normal extended partition, and see if that fixes things.

Problem there, I think, is that Windows still sees the entire disk as a Dynamic disk, even though I have rewritten the MBR, as well as repartitions the boot partition.

[Grok]

Here are the results of DMDIAG.EXE ... http://www.valhallalegends.com/pub/dmdiag.txt

Just ran it, now trying to make sense out of it so I can revert this back to a Basic Disk and recover those two partitions.

I am safe now, I have recovered the files, so that i no longer a concern.

[MyndFyre]

Perhaps this might be applicable:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=245725

Or this:

http://www.winnetmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=7107

If you Ghosted, you might have gotten the MBR:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=166997

[edit]  LoL, glad I could be of help while making this post

[Grok]

Thanks, but I'm almost home.

I loaded up Paragon Partition Manager 5.6, changed the Partition ID of the last partition from 0x42 (dynamic) to 0x07 (HPFS or NTFS), and it made that partition visible to me, even assigning it a drive letter E:.

Unfortunately, it blew away the 40GB partition, which was the one with all the data I wanted.  Had I known it would work, I would've changed the ID of this one instead.

Soooooo, fortunately, I had used Winternals Disk Commander to save the partition tables.  I will just restore the partition tables there, then go back into Paragon PM 5.6 and change the 40GB to a regular NTFS (0x07) partition.

Whew.

[MyndFyre]

Thanks, but I'm almost home.

I loaded up Paragon Partition Manager 5.6, changed the Partition ID of the last partition from 0x42 (dynamic) to 0x07 (HPFS or NTFS), and it made that partition visible to me, even assigning it a drive letter E:.

Unfortunately, it blew away the 40GB partition, which was the one with all the data I wanted.  Had I known it would work, I would've changed the ID of this one instead.

Soooooo, fortunately, I had used Winternals Disk Commander to save the partition tables.  I will just restore the partition tables there, then go back into Paragon PM 5.6 and change the 40GB to a regular NTFS (0x07) partition.

Whew.

Good call sir.

Everyone could take a lesson from this -- always back up your critical disk information before modifying it with a low-level editor

[Yoni]

Glad to hear it worked out.

A question as an afterthought:
Was the partition originally a "Dynamic Disk" on purpose? If so, why?

If not, stay away from "Dynamic Disk". It looks to me like a major headache.

[Grok]

Glad to hear it worked out.

A question as an afterthought:
Was the partition originally a "Dynamic Disk" on purpose? If so, why?

If not, stay away from "Dynamic Disk". It looks to me like a major headache.

Yes.  It was a dynamic disk because it greatly simplifies managing partitions.  Especially true if you create and destroy various partitions for projects, and have several such things going on at the same time.

However, it looks like you can quickly switch back to 'basic disk' by merely changing the partition IDs.  The part.I.D. of dynamic disks is 0x42, while a normal NTFS partition is 0x07, even when part of an extended disk.

Simply switching them back to 0x07 appears to remove Windows' notions of the disk being Dynamic.  But this is untested beyond the one time.  When I changed my last partition from 0x42 to 0x07, DiskMgmt called the entire disk 'basic', and let me access the partition.  Before you do this with normal data, make sure you have a backup.

[Adron]

I think that turning a Dynamic Disk into a regular disk only works if you haven't used any of the special features that Dynamic Disks offer. If you have, your data is most likely lost. This then means that you can use Dynamic Disks safely as long as you do only what you could do without using Dynamic Disks, which means that there's no reason to use Dynamic Disks

[MyndFyre]

I think that turning a Dynamic Disk into a regular disk only works if you haven't used any of the special features that Dynamic Disks offer. If you have, your data is most likely lost. This then means that you can use Dynamic Disks safely as long as you do only what you could do without using Dynamic Disks, which means that there's no reason to use Dynamic Disks

Not necessarily.  What I gather from Grok is that a dynamic disk lets you manage more partitions (ahem, *volumes*) than a Basic Disk will allow, while also managing to change aspects without rebooting (now -- I've done partitioning without rebooting, on basic disks, so I'm not sure where these situations exist; I have read about them, however).  It seems that in situations where data is not spanned -- or even where a volume is spanned, but data doesn't spill over to the second volume -- you should probably be able to recover with intelligent use of a disk editor.

[Thing]

Bah! It sucks that I missed this thread.  Nevertheless, I would have just whipped out my handy dandy EasyRecovery Professional Edition and pulled all of the recoverable files to another drive.

[Grok]

Bah! It sucks that I missed this thread.  Nevertheless, I would have just whipped out my handy dandy EasyRecovery Professional Edition and pulled all of the recoverable files to another drive.

In the end, that's what I did using Winternals Disk Commander.  But most of my time was spent trying to do an in-place repair of the partitions.  I didn't want to be forced to moved 40GB away, then back again.

[Adron]

Not necessarily.  What I gather from Grok is that a dynamic disk lets you manage more partitions (ahem, *volumes*) than a Basic Disk will allow, while also managing to change aspects without rebooting (now -- I've done partitioning without rebooting, on basic disks, so I'm not sure where these situations exist; I have read about them, however).  It seems that in situations where data is not spanned -- or even where a volume is spanned, but data doesn't spill over to the second volume -- you should probably be able to recover with intelligent use of a disk editor.

Well, a basic disk allows you to have at least 20 "partitions" - drives, so I don't think the number of partitions is a severely limiting factor. And I too have repartitioned basic disks without rebooting, so that isn't something new either. What is new is spanning, and I really don't think that you can recover a spanned volume formatted in ntfs with any small uses of a disk editor. Not even if all the data happens to be on the first volume of a spanned set.

[Grok]

Hard drive is only specified with a 4-entry partition table.  To get 20 partitions, they're really making one an extended.