Converting dynamic to basic to span...

Ok, the following is what I want to do.

I have two 500GB disks, one with the system partition to boot, and a second one, which served as mirror backup since now. But I also have en external 500GB disk, as backup too, if both disks inside would die.

Now I thought having an original plus 2 copies would be too much, and I bought an external 1TB for the backup now, but instead of also buying a 1TB internal disk, I want to span one partition on the 1st disk with the whole 2nd disk.

Disk 1:

- C:\System = 25GB (booting partition)
- D:\Temp = 25GB
- E:\Emulation = 450GB

Disk 2:

- F:\Mirror = 500GB

Ok, so far so good. I know that I have to convert the basic disks to dynamic to be able to span them, so I already converted disk 2 to dynamic. But as I cannot convert a partition, but only the whole disk, I'm unsure to convert disk 1 now to dynamic, because I don't know if I will lose my partitions, or if I will still be able to boot from that disk.

So my questions are:

- can I convert disk 1 to dynamic without losing data (or partitions)?
- if it works, can I then convert back to basic, or should I just leave the disks as dynamic?
- is there perhaps a software that makes this task easier?

Any help is appreciated.

You can convert a basic disk to dynamic without losing data (as long as there is enough free space on the drive to create the partition record database partition at the end of the drive).

Just go to XP's Disk Management, right click on the drive's volume label to the left of the partition display (normally shown as Disk0, Disk1 etc..) and select convert to dynamic.

However you can't convert a dynamic disk back to basic disk without first wiping and re-creating the volume, as it requires the repartitioning of the entire disk (because dynamic disk partitioning is proprietary), so all data and existing partitions would be lost.

Remember that OS's before Windows 2000 cannot access dynamic disks. And non Windows OS's such as Linux cannot access them either. They are also not supported by XP Home or portable computers.

It is annoying how M$ changed the way disk partitioning worked since Windows 2000. Before that you could setup a stripe, mirror, or spanned set using basic disks. But now you have to convert the drives to dynamic before this is possible. I suppose the more advanced technology used by dynamic disks is more robust and better.

Originally Posted by Harrison:
However you can't convert a dynamic disk back to basic disk without first wiping and re-creating the volume, as it requires the repartitioning of the entire disk (because dynamic disk partitioning is proprietary), so all data and existing partitions would be lost.

Ok, so can I leave the disks as dynamic and boot from there?? I mean, it wouldn't make sense to convert them back to basic, or would it? I have XP Pro installed.

I already did the converting for disk 2 yesterday, and it kept the files without deleting anything.

Btw, as I also did a backup image, but did it whilst the disk was still basic, would it work when I try to set it back to a dynamic disk? I don't think so, I guess I have to make a new image once my disk is converted to dynamic.

Have you tried using Acronis Disk Director Suite? There are plenty of versions with parrots (i.e. :piarate5:) out there and I managed to get my two original hard disks onto one bigger one in a fully workable order after a bit of experimenting.

Yep, I have the Acronis Disk Director Suite 10, but that doesn't do spanning. The problem is that I don't want to only span 2 disks, but one disk with a partition from another disk, where there's also data that shouldn't be deleted.

Disks are spanned now, everything worked without any problem, converting to dynamic first, spanning the 2 partitions (on 2 different disks), then formatting. Now the 2 disks are still dynamic, but that doesn't affect anything compared to basic. System is booting like usual. Now I'm copying the files back to the spanned partition, which is now 950GB.

How is it with my True Image backup now? I did it when the disk was still set as basic, can I use the same one for the dynamic disk, or should I create a new backup?

If everything is working fine on your new disk layout then a create new disk image.