Hello there,I installed Vista couple of months back on a dual-boot with WinXP Home and recently my harddisk unable to detect "winload.exe" on booting and it seems that my harddisk some how showing dynamic volume and I can't install either XP or Vista on that anymore.So I bought another harddisk and installed XP Pro and Vista and I tried to hook my Crashed harddisk (HDD2) as secondary and used a recovery software and recovered all my data from my documents of XP from HDD2. But when I tried to recover Vista documents, I'm unable to do the recovery using the third-party recovery software that I have.I presume this is due to the security reason Vista is hiding all the files. I mean the files are physically listed by that software but when I tried to download it and it is saying the files are corrupted and unable to open the files.Is there any way that I can convert the dynamic volume to basic volume without loosing any data?I found an article about "dskprobe.exe" but I'm not pretty sure about it and afraid that I will loose my data.So please give me some guidance so I can recover them all.ThanksregardsRiaz.

Riaz, Be very cautious about using dskprobe. There are some articles on the Web that indicate you can change a couple of bytes on your hard drive and convert it from a dynamic disk to a basic disk. I tried this once on a Windows Server 2003 machine and rendered the disk useless. What third-party recovery software are you using? You have to make sure that: 1. It specifically supports Vista. I don't think Norton's PartitionMagic works with Vista, but Acronis Disk Director does. 2. It works with Dynamic disks. Hope this helps! -Tony Mann

Hi Tony,Thanks for your reply.Answer for your questions.1. I have a copy of Acronis Disk Director.2. You said it will work with Dynamic disks.My concern is, my crashed harddisk is connected as a secondary to my current XP/vista dual-boot harddisk. Is it ok if I install Acronis on to my XP and do the conversion or doing it under Vista is safer?Actually I don't see my partition at all when I try to view under My Computer but if I run the Disk Management under "Manage Computer" it is listed as a single whole disk instead of the 2 partition which was allocated.I can proceed if this will rectify my problems. If there is any more suggestion from the experts it is greatly appreciated.ThanksRiaz.

Hey Riaz, Before doing anything, I would make sure that you do a low-level disk duplication of the drive in question. That way you are sure to be safe if something goes wrong. Next, I would run Disk Director on Vista. However, please note that I did not say it will work with dynamic disks. I mentioned that you need to make sure that it works with dynamic disks. I don't know if this is a limitation of the software or not. When you run Disk Director, it should tell you if it cannotmanage partitions from a dynamic disk, or you can simply ask Acronis tech support. Hope this helps! -Tony

Hi there,Thanks for you replies.... I'm still figuring it out how to do a low-level backup of my harddisk I downloaded the Stellar Pheonix and will give a try and also in the meantime, I am checking whether any of the Acronis suite will help me to recover the dynamic parition to basic and recover the data or not.Will update about it and also appreciate the replies from you guys.regardsRiaz.

Hello, I apologize for the intrusion but I think my problem has to do with your discussion. I have a dynamic disk spanned over 4 physical HDDs. None of them runs the OS, they're only storage. My OS is Vista Sp1. I would like to move my dynamic disk, actually connected on the MB through SATA connectors, to an external RAID enclosure. I don't want to loose data. I think I need to transform my storage to a RAID 0 type, but I am not sure. How can I do that? Thanks

Hey tmaraz, in windows, if you wanna convert dynamic disk to basic you have to delete all the partitions on it . since you dont want to lose the data, I think, you'd better try some professional third party softwares to solve the problem instead of doing it by yourself. you got two options: 1. get another recovery software to get the rest data back, about which i would recommend easeus data recovery wizard. it's professional version supports dynamic disks. http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizardpro/ 2. convert the dynamic disk to basic one. about this, a partition manager can help. but there should only be four volumes on the dynamic disk, for the volumes will be converted to primary partitions, which, as we all know, are limited to 4 on a basic disk . http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/convert-dynamic-disk-to-basic-disk.htm