Hack A Dynamic Disk Back To A Basic Disk
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The advantage of a dynamic disk is that you can span two (or more) disks and you can perform disk and volume management without rebooting. Microsoft says a dynamic disk cannot be changed back to a basic disk without deleting the partition(s) and rebuilding the disk. But what if you’ve got a lot of data on it - or program files - and don’t want to take the time to rebuild it?
This article at The Lazyadmin.com has an elegant hack that allows you to edit a couple of bytes on the disk using DskProbe from the Windows 2000 SP4 Support Tools or the Windows 2003 Support Tools (a free download from Microsoft) to change it back to a basic disk without having to rebuild it. You’ll have to do it for each partition on the dynamic disk.
WARNING: Have a complete data backup of the dynamic disk before you try this - in case you make a mistake or it doesn’t work!
Tags: lazyadmin.com, 2003 support tools, dynamic disk, basic disk, dskprobe
One Comment
William Grosbach
June 24th, 2008
at 11:24am
I’ve been trying for years to find a program that will reliably image the 2 dynamic disks (each a simple volume) on a Windows 2000 Professional workstation to DVD, so I can upgrade it to larger disks. Both disks are Ultra SCSI (1 is 160 and the other is 320, but the controller is 160).
Most programs I’ve seen that claimed to work were for servers and cost hundreds of dollars.
I’ve tried a couple of non-server programs, but wasn’t persuaded the results were usable (they didn’t verify).
Anybody have any ideas?