Here is the story.<\/p>\n
I had a Windows 7 machine that I was using as a test bed for various applications and settings.
I was trying to recover some files from an old hard drive. I attached the drive via a usb dock. And I was able to grab most of the files I wanted via a rescue start up disk.<\/p>\n
I then wanted to delete the partitions on that old drive and format it. Simple enough. But the damaged drive was still giving me problems. I should have used the boot CD to kill it there. But instead, like a maroon, I booted into Windows & and tried to just ‘add’ the disk in the disk manager.
But somewhere in my sleepiness after a 16+ hour day I converted my Windows 7 drive to a dynamic volume that included the messed up drive!
Before I realized what I had done it was too late.<\/p>\n
What to do?<\/p>\n
With the damaged drive not working my ‘dynamic volume’ was now in accessable after restarting the machine!
So on with the searching for a solution.
I read over and over how a Dynamic Disk could NOT be converted back to a Basic Disk.
Even Microsoft say this is so!<\/p>\n
But I knew I had read somewhere about editing the MBR and setting the drive back to basic year ago. I may have even done it.
And after many days and many hours I found a simple elegant solution in an old post that WORKED!<\/p>\n
I simply pulled out the affected Windows 7 drive and used my HDD dock to attach it to one of my main machines and edit the MBR sector to change the disk back to a Basic Disk.<\/p>\n
Basically it involves using a freeware hex disk editor<\/a> to open the MBR and just change one sector(sector 0 location 1C2) value from ’42’ to ’07’ saving the change. Then running a check disk and fix (chkdsk x: \/f). It is very detailed and easy to follow. Here is the story. I had a Windows 7 machine that I was using as a test bed for various applications and settings.I was trying to recover some files from an old hard drive. I attached the drive via a usb dock. And I was able to grab most of the files I wanted via … Continue reading “Convert Dynamic Disk back to Basic Disk WITHOUT data loss”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":587,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,44,24,13,1,16,11,15],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t
I put the drive back in booted and after a few moments of ‘recovery’ at start up my entire OS was back!
Here is the post.<\/a> <\/p>\n
I hope no one needs it but if you do this is good to have in your tech notes file.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"