to make the story short... my laptop's HDD somehow got converted to a dynamic disk. upon googling means to convert it back to basic, I read that all I need to do is a reformat/reinstall and that at the reinstall step, when you choose to delete/create partitions and select a partition to install the OS on, reformatting it would fix the issue...

wrong... ha So here I am stuck... anything I can do? It's a SATA drive and my other laptop is IDE... I tried an XP disk to try to just delete/reformat but it doesn't recognize my HDD...

help

2/21/2010 5:08:46 PM

nope. only thing you can do is reformat. that's why you don't go dynamic. ever. not that you probably meant to

2/21/2010 5:10:49 PM

lol, yeh, I know that now

But I did reformat (using W7 CD to reinstall W7)... but that doesn't change the disk to basic. I'm guessing I'll have to get a usb-sata HDD enclosure and use my XP machine to convert it?

will xp recognize the drive? when I tried to XP disc to reformat the sata drive, it didn't recognize the drive...

2/21/2010 5:14:03 PM

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted-live-stable/0.5.1-1/gparted-live-0.5.1-1.iso/download

2/21/2010 6:08:25 PM

Reformatting isn't enough, you need to rewrite the master file table. You can "revert" a dynamic disk in Windows, but not the drive that Windows is running from because I'm pretty sure you have to delete all the partitions before it will let you.

^ That should do the trick.

Quote :

"that's why you don't go dynamic. ever."

Got something against the native software RAID in Windows?

2/21/2010 6:31:46 PM

I ended up running by Intrex and picking up an enclosure so I could just reformat it through my XP machine... worked just fine.

Thanks for the help/options.

^Yeh, I had to delete all partitions & reformat, which you can't do if it's the only HDD.

2/21/2010 6:49:57 PM

why WOULDN'T I have something against an OS RAID system that renders a drive unusable when the OS is taken off?

2/21/2010 7:01:35 PM

It doesn't render the drive unusable. You just have to reinitialize the disk if you want to use it with something other than Windows. The same is the case if you use mdadm in linux.

2/21/2010 8:24:43 PM

Quote :

"I ended up running by Intrex and picking up an enclosure so I could just reformat it through my XP machine... worked just fine. Thanks for the help/options. ^Yeh, I had to delete all partitions & reformat, which you can't do if it's the only HDD."

lol that was a convoluted way to do that

2/21/2010 8:37:00 PM

how was it convoluted? put the drive in the enclosure, plug into xp machine usb port, disk management, format.

2/21/2010 10:12:22 PM

if you are just formatting why did you take the time to plug it to another machine, why not just do it from that one?

2/21/2010 10:30:06 PM

sigh...

ok, maybe I didn't communicate this well enough. I did reformat it but that didn't fix my issue of the disc being a dynamic disk. You can't convert the primary/OS disc from dynamic to basic if it's the only disk. Thus, I attempted a reformat/reinstall using my W7 DVD... so from the reformat/OS location selection utility, I reformatted the HDD (it was split into a primary OS partition and a system reserved partition, both dynamic and on the same physical disk). This utility only reformatted each partition, not the entire disk... thus after reformatting I was left with two, empty & reformatted, partitions on a dynamic disk. in order to convert the disk I had to either treat it as an external drive on another computer & reformat the drive, us what evan posted (which he posted after I had already done all of this & I don't known anything about what he posted, so I like my way better still), or possibly install unbuntu & use that to reformat (of which I know nothing, so again, treating it as an external was a good way to go.)


so the moral of the story... the given utility on the W7 DVD would not reformat the drive, only the partitions.

2/21/2010 10:39:47 PM

yeah, that's exactly what i thought you were saying.

still too complicated (and unnecessarily expensive).

gparted is easy as hell to use. download a copy, burn the iso to a CD, and keep it around - you'll inevitably need it (and most likely at a time where you have no other computer available to download a copy, haha).

2/21/2010 11:02:09 PM

^lol, thanks. I guess that may have been easier... if I had CDs laying around and knew what gparted was.... guess some patience would have paid off... but I figure it's not a bad thing to have a sata enclosure sitting around

2/21/2010 11:07:28 PM

yet another thread showing wdprice3's technical ineptitude. How the hell does one accidentally convert a drive to a dynamic disk?

Every thread he posts makes me die a little more inside.

2/22/2010 1:12:02 AM

OH NO! SOMEONE DOESN'T KNOW AS MUCH ABOUT COMPUTERS AS YOU!
OH NO! SOMEONE MADE A MISTAKE AND ASKED FOR HELP!

and yes, I am completely inept with technology. just shut the fuck up and get back on bill gate's dick

and if my threads are slowly causing your death either start clicking through all of them and off yourself or don't fucking open them.

2/22/2010 1:38:25 AM

It's not so much your lack of knowledge that bothers me.

Its your repeated patterns of doing retarded things, asking for help, then either ignoring the help given or complaining about the answers you get.

And then you still chime in constantly all over tech talk with your opinions like they carry some weight, or have any insight behind them.

Oh, and with taking this like the little twit you are and blowing it all out of proportion, getting your panties in a wad and PM'ing me in a huff. It doesn't surprise me at all that you didn't even get the point, I guess I should have expected as much.

2/22/2010 2:35:50 AM

I blow things out of proportion? My repeated pattern of doing things... like what? asking for advice?
how many retarded things have I done?

this is one of the few things. and I didn't ignore the help or complain about it, I had already fixed the problem before anyone posted any help.

and I don't chime in all over tech talk. I chime in on things I know.

and learning by trial and error is a bad thing now? get off your high horse ans shut the fuck up.

2/22/2010 9:52:13 AM