Help with Dynamic Disk

[hopeless879]

My friend had 2 hard drives in his comp and was running Win2k. The system drive was an 80 GB and he had a 200 GB drive for storage. He wanted to use WinXP so he saved everything to the 200 GB drive, formatted the 80 GB and installed WinXP.

This is where the problem started. When XP started up it recognized his 200 GB drive and installed it, but it says the drive is empty. When you try to explore the 200 GB drive, it gives an error saying the drive is not formatted, would you like to format it now? In Windows disk management the drive shows up as dynamic instead of basic and it shows the drive as completely empty with no partitions.

My friend doesn't know much about computers so he doesn't know how his drives were setup with Win2k.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to see the data on the 200 GB drive? Thanks.

 

[Sureshot324]

You have to import the dynamic disk. I forget exactly how to do this, but you should be able to figure it out going through the windows control panels. In general you shouldn't convert disks to dynamic unless you need them for some reason because you can't convert them back to basic disks.

 

[hopeless879]

I did import, it, The disk manager recognizes it, but can't see anything on it.

 

[hopeless879]

bump

 

[myocardia]

Assuming that they're both IDE drives, this should work. I guarantee you it would have worked if he had bought it to start with.

 

[EeyoreX]

Does he have SP 1 for XP installed? Did he follow all the steps here before trying to access the data? It could very well be that if Windows XP was not properly set up to recognize and use the 48-bit LBA structure of the large hard drive that the data was corrupted and lost.

\Dan