Tuesday, May 3, 2011

How to non-destructively convert dynamic disks to basic disks

Scenario:  I finally got the chance to upgrade a server from a Windows 2003 Software based RAID 1 (mirror) to a Hardware based RAID array.  The problem that I didn't foresee, is that after breaking the software RAID,  cloning the original disk partitions to the new RAID array using Clonezilla, the Windows installation didn't like the fact that it was now presented with Basic Disks that were in fact still formatted as Dynamic Disks.  After looking for details on the Blue Screen I was receiving on boot, I finally realised what the problem was and this fairly quickly led to the discovery of this blog post...
This method uses a nice little piece of software called TestDisk.  I'm not exactly sure what it does to the partition tables, or what ever is being modified, but it works, and does it very quickly!  
Anyway, I hope that this gets spread around and eventually helps someone out.  
L8a!

No comments:

Post a Comment