Convert Logical Disk to Basic Disk without data loss ?

futureal33

futureal33

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Made a slight cockup last night while swapping two drives around. I have converted one disk with all my music (around 1TB!) to a dynamic disk, which means Windows cant read off it. The drive has 2 partitions, one which is 1.8TB and holds all the files I want, and a 4GB partition which Im not sure what it is - nothing I need.

The only Windows options I have are format and delete volume - both of which will erase all data on the disk.

3 hours on google last night has basically got me nowhere, other than a load of "trial" software programs which identify that it CAN restore the files, only once I pay $79 etc. Clearly I want to be able to do this for free if at all possible.

As a final resort I used Acronis Disk Director to convert the Dynamic Disk entirely to a Logical Disk - in the hope this would work. However it seems also that Windows cant read a Logical disk, and my options remain the same (delete and format)

Can anyone recommend a way to either

A) Get the MP3 files off this disk and somewhere else
or
B) Convert the entire disk to something Windows CAN read so I can copy the files manually onto another HDD

Any help MUCH appreciated!
Thanks
 
Windows can read dynamic disks.

What did you do? Is the drive from another machine? How did you concert it?
 
Lol
 
Hmm well when I click it, it says this drive must be formatted before you can use it.

The drive is from a Synology NAS drive. Basically I took the drive out, and put it in my PC - the only option I had was to convert to Dynamic disk - which is where I am at now.

Ive tried putting it back in the NAS and now the Synology doesnt recognise it!
 
if you took it from a synology itll probably be in a linux style FS off the top of my head. if it was raid'd then you may not be able to read the data anyway.

fiddling around with the disk type has more than likely stopped the synology being able to read it/build it back to the raid.

what exactly are you trying to achieve?
 
Chances are the synology uses a filesystem that Windows cannot understand (e.g. ext3 or something). Further, if the drive you removed was part of a raid array it might not have complete data on it.

edit - neil was faster than me!
 
Neil,

I downloaded a program which recovers files off deleted partitions. I scanned the drive (I:) and it found 11,000 MP3 files on there. When I clicked recover to: it came up with a "pay now" option etc - as above, ideally I want to do this for free!!

So that proves to me that the files are still on this disk, I just cant seem to get at them.

All I want to do is recover my 1TB of MP3s off the disk... then format it
 
well yeah because the program will more than likely be capable of scanning EXT3 filesystems. windows wont be able to read an EXT3 disk natively, nothing to do with being dynamic :)

presumably the synology drive failed then? i cant think of any other reason why you'd want to destroy the data drive on there to read it on windows.

you can try one of the free recovery tools often suggested on here - http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/best-recovery-software-help.528710/#post-6092998
 
No the Synology drive didnt fail...long story! I had a 2TB in my Syno which was nearly full, and a 3TB in my PC which had about 120GB on it of system backups.

Realising I kind of had it the wrong way round, I swapped the drives over..

So I need something that can read EXT3 filesystems basically?
I tried Recuva last night and can confirm that wouldn't recognise the drive at all.

I'll give the others on that thread a go.

Thanks for the help!
 
yeah, but like mark said if the drive was part of a raid it wont have all of the data on.

worse case you could try a bootable linux live cd.

long story short, you cant just pull drives from a raid/nas. youll need to rebuild your nas when you replace the drive too which will wipe any other drives in the unit.
 
I had this problem with my drives a while back. I ended up sending off to a company near me that managed to get all the files off onto another drive and then formatted mine and reloaded the data. It only cost me £65 which i thought was fairly resonable considering the files were irreplacable.
 
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