Convert a Basic Disk to a Dynamic Disk

How to Convert a Basic Disk to a Dynamic Disk​

   Information

A disk is a separate physical hard drive. This will show you how to convert a basic disk to a dynamic, also known as "software RAID", disk in Windows Disk Manager or in a command prompt without losing anything on the disk. By default Windows uses Basic disks.

Basic and dynamic disks both support using MBR and GPT partition (volume) styles. When you convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, any existing partitions or logical drives on the basic disk become simple volumes on the dynamic disk.

For more detailed information on basic and dynamic disks, see: Basic and Dynamic Disks (Windows)

   Note

Differences Between Basic and Dynamic Disks:

• Basic disks are supported (readable) by all Windows operating systems since MS-DOS.
  • Dynamic disks are only supported (readable) by Windows 2000, XP Professional, Windows Server 2003, Vista Ultimate, Vista Enterprise, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008.
• Basic disks can have up to 128 GPT primary partitions, or 4 MBR primary partitions or or 3 MBR primary partition and 1 extended partition with up to 128 logical volumes in the extended partition.
  • Dynamic disks can have up to 2000 dynamic volumes that function like a primary partition used in basic disks.
• Basic disks cannot share or split data with other primary or logical partitions, or basic disks. Each partitiion on a basic disk is treated as if it was a separate hard disk on the basic disk.
  • Separate dynamic disks can be combined into a single dynamic volume (spanning), split data among several dynamic disks (striping) for increased performance, or duplicate data among several dynamic disks (mirroring) for increased reliability.
• Hard disks are basic disks by default, including removable disks and disks on a laptop (notepad).
  • Removable disks or disks on a laptop (notepad) cannot be converted to a dynamic disk.

   Warning

VERY IMPORTANT, PLEASE READ THIS FIRST.

• You must be a administrator to do this in Windows.
• DO NOT convert a basic disk that contains a installed operating system to a dynamic disk. Doing so will cause you to no longer be able to boot or start that operating system.
• If you are using a basic disk as a storage area for shadow copies (System Protection) and you intend to convert the disk into a dynamic disk, it is important to take the following precaution to avoid the loss of data in the storage area. If the basic disk is a non-boot volume (partition) and is a different volume from where the original files reside, you must first dismount and take offline the volume containing the original files before you convert the disk containing shadow copies to a dynamic disk. You must bring the volume containing the original files back online within 20 minutes, otherwise, you will lose the data stored in the existing shadow copies. If the shadow copies are located on a boot volume, you can convert the disk to dynamic without losing shadow copies. You can use the mountvol command with the /p option to dismount the volume and take it offline. You can mount the volume and bring it online using the mountvol command or the Disk Management snap-in.
• When restoring a system image from a dynamic volume, the disks on your computer cannot be formatted to match the layout of the disks on the backup. To have full functionality, select a volume (partition) on a basic disk as your backup location instead.
• After you convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, you cannot change the dynamic volumes back to partitions. Instead, you must delete all dynamic volumes on the dynamic disk and then convert it to a basic disk. If you want to keep your data, you must first back it up or move it to another volume.
• If you disable the Disk Defragmenter service, then you will get the error below when you try to do anything in Disk Management. If you get this error, then make sure that the Disk Defragmenter service is set to only Manual.

OPTION ONE

Convert Disk from Basic to Dynamic in Disk Management

1. Open the Control Panel (Icons view), and click on the Administrative Tools icon, then close the Control Panel window.

2. Click on Computer Management in Administrative Tools, then close the Administrative Tools window.

3. If prompted by UAC, click on Yes.

4. In the left pane under Storage, click on Disk Management. (See screenshot below)

5. Right click on the disk (ex: Disk 1) that you want to convert to a dynamic disk, and click on Convert to Dynamic Disk. (See screenshot above)

6. Make sure that the box is checked for only the disk (ex: Disk 1) that you want to convert to a dynamic disk, and click on OK. (See screenshot below)

7. Click on Convert. (See left screenshot below)
NOTE: To see more details about the disk being converted, click on the Details button first. Click on OK. when done with details. (See right screenshot below)

8. Click on Yes to confirm. (See screenshot below)

9. When done, you will notice that the disk is now a dynamic disk with your partitions from the basic disk now as simple volumes in Disk Management. (See screenshot below)

10. If this is a new HDD and it is all unallocated space, then you can now create new simple volumes with the unallocated space.

11. When done, close Disk Management.

OPTION TWO

Convert Disk from Basic to Dynamic in a Command Prompt

1. Open a elevated command prompt.
A) Go to step 3.
OR

2. Open a command prompt at boot.

3. In the command prompt, type diskpart and press enter. (See screenshot above)

4. Type list disk and press enter.
NOTE: Make note of the disk number (ex: Disk 1) that you want to convert to a dynamic disk.

5. Type select disk # and press enter.
NOTE: Substitute # with the actual disk number that you want to convert to a dynamic disk. For example, select disk 1.

6. Type convert dynamic and press enter.

7. When done, type exit and press enter.

8. Close the command prompt.
NOTE: Restart the computer if you did step 2 instead.

That's it,
Shawn

Related Tutorials

---

• How to Convert a Dynamic Disk to a Basic Disk
• How to Convert a MBR Disk to a GPT Disk
• How to Convert a GPT Disk to a MBR Disk
• How to Convert a FAT or FAT32 Volume to NTFS in Windows 7
• How to Extend a Partition or Volume in Windows 7
• How to Create a New Partition or Volume in Windows 7
• How to Delete a Partition or Volume in Windows 7
• How to Shrink a Partition or Volume in Windows 7
• How to Clean or Clean All a Disk with the Diskpart Command
• How to Quick Format a HDD or USB Drive

 

[Night Hawk]

Keep'em coming Shawn! That's another one to note and quite easy to follow in one quick glance!

 

[Brink]

Thank you Night Hawk. Will do.

 

[Brink]

Hello Ronny, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Since this is for the hard disk that you have your Windows 7 and factory recovery partitions on, then DO NOT CONVERT it to a dynamic disk. If you do, then Windows 7 will become unbootable and you will not be able to use your factory recovery partition to restore/reinstall Windows 7 with.

Could you post back a screenshot of your Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) showing your drive layout? This way we can may be able to offer you some alternative suggestions.


Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[Brink]

Correct, you do not want to convert this to a dynamic disk.

It looks like your OEM has done a lousy job of partitioning the drive. Since you have 4 primary partitions like this, you will not be able to create a new primary or logical partition on this drive with the size you want without having to delete one of them first. This is not recommended to do though since the ones without a drive letter are part of your OEM Windows 7 factory recovery.

I would strongly recommend getting a 2nd 2.5" drive, and installing it in your laptop to use for Linux instead. You should be able to get one pretty cheap these days. This would be your easiest option.

 

[ronny007mate]

Ok, now this is not my fault, I especially purchased this new laptop with good HDD with a view to installing two OS (windows 7 and Linux) and Oracle on linux...that was my requirement. Now who is responsible for this all mess up? Can I go back to Best Buy from where I purchased it? Or should I contact Toshiba (my laptop brand) to support any help?? Your suggestions please???

 

[Brink]

No, it's not your fault.

It's just how Toshiba decided to set up your drive's partitions like this. On a single hard disk, you can only have up to 4 primary (Navy) partitions, or 3 Primary partitions and 1 Extended partition with up to 128 logical volumes in the extended partition.

You have basically two options. I would recommend the second one though since DVDs are not as reliable as having the factory recovery on the HDD.

1) Create a set of Toshiba recovery DVDs to be able to use for a factory restore of Windows 7 (if ever needed) instead. Delete only the 18.06 and 10.63 partitions until they are unallocated space. You can then use this unallocated for linux.

2) Get a 2nd 2.5" drive, and installing it in your laptop to use for Linux instead.

 

[ronny007mate]

Thanks Shawn, Your responses were really helpful and that will save my lots of time now. I am having one harddisk with me from my another laptop, of which mother board got crashed but the HDD is intact. One of computer repairing shop owner was saying that I can convert that HDD into USB and can continue using it. I have already linux and oracle installed on that HDD. Can I continue using that HDD as a USB with my new toshiba laptop? Thanks

 

[Brink]

Sorry mate, but it would not work for what you are wanting to do with a USB connection.

Most laptops will have room for two 2.5" hard drives. It's usually just a small panel held in place with screws on the bottom of the laptop where you will pop in the drive at. You'll need to consult your laptop's manual for exact details on it though since each laptop will vary a bit on how it's done.

 

[thefabe]

Another great Tutorila Shawn. Learned something new today so that's out of the way.
Fabe

 

[Brink]

You're most welcome Eric. Thank you.

 

[HoneycombAG]

So I would have to have 2 or more physical disks in my system to make them Dynamic disks, regardless of whether I have hardware RAID turned on or not? That seems about right, except how do you make a striped-mirrored setup?

 

[Brink]

Hello HC,

You can make any single disk dynamic.

You can combine separate dynamic hard disks into a single dynamic volume (called spanning), split data among several hard disks (called striping) for increased performance, or duplicate data among several hard disks (called mirroring) for increased reliability.

What Are Dynamic Disks and Volumes?: Storage Services

Basic and Dynamic Disks (Windows)

Personally, I would not make them dynamic disks. You could set up a RAID 0+1 for mirrored and stripe if supported by your RAID controller. The problem is RAID 0+1 first creates a stripe set out of two or more drives, and then mirrors the whole structure onto the same number of additional hard drives. Basically, you'll need four hard drives. Two to stripe, and the other two to mirror.

RAID 0+1: Mirrored Stripe Set (Performance & Data Safety) - RAID Scaling Charts, Part 1

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[RandyD123]

Confused!

I am confused to as what this means: "When restoring a system image from a dynamic volume, the disks on your computer cannot be formatted to match the layout of the disks on the backup. To have full functionality, select a volume (partition) on a basic disk as your backup location instead."

I have a Dell XPS8700 with Windows 8.1. I just formatted out 2 500GB drives to act as a Dynamic Disk. I would like to image my OS drive and store the image, in a folder, on the newly created Dynamic Disk. My primary OS was originally on a factory installed 500GD WD disk. I used Macrium to copy my partitions to the new SSD drive. Everything works as far as the Diagnostics Partition and the Restore Partition. Windows shows 5 partitions on the disk, Macrium shows 6. Anyway the copy went fine and all is well.

What do I need to know about storing OS images on the new dynamic volume? Can I use GPT? Should I make a few partitions on the dynamic disk?

 

[Brink]

Hello Randy,

It basically just means that the disk needs to be one partition at least as large as the size of the image to be able to restore the image to it. If you had it all partitioned, there may not be enough space to do so.

Personally, I would not recommend using dynamic volumes if you didn't have to, and stick with basic MBR instead. This way you are less prone to risk of data loss.

Sure GPT is fine to use for a data disk in Windows 7.

For storing multiple system images, I find renaming the WindowsImageBackup folder like in method two in the yellow tip box at the top of the tutorial below works the best.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/663-backup-complete-computer-create-image-backup.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[weismannweb]

Clearing Up Some Incorrect Info On The Internet

Hi,

So I decided to mirror my wifes system partition and C:/ partition to a 2nd disk. It failed at first but I got it working after a huge ordeal. I want to post my experience here because there is a lot of misinformation about this topic in various places all over the internet and I want to share what I learned in case it is helpful to anybody. I realize a lot of info online is outdated and that may be the issue.

First some links that helped:
Bootrec: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/927392
BCD Edit: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709667(v=ws.10).aspx
Bootrec 2: https://neosmart.net/wiki/bootrec/
Mark Partition as Active: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/71432-partition-mark-active.html


Second the following is NOT true:

1. This can be true sometimes but not always....that the boot information is on your OS drive/partition (like drive C) and it needs to be active.
2. That the system drive and operating system drive can not be converted to a dynamic disk or mirrored to a 2nd disk.
3. That you need to convert back to a basic disk if you did that.
4. That you need to reinstall the OS.

So here are my explanations for these untrue things that lead me down the wrong path:
1. This issue ONLY APPLIES if you followed advice on setting a drive as active for a possible solution. So your boot data and config can either be on the C: (or whatever drive your os is on) or a hidden system drive which on windows 7 is exactly 100MB. If you installed w7 from scratch you likely are using the 100mb system drive. The 100mb system drive needs to be the active drive (also some people called this a boot flag but its the same as far as I can tell). When trying to fix things I changed the C drive as the active drive and that caused me hours of going in the wrong direction and I had to recover from that once I realized my error. This is helpful to fix that: see mark partition as active link above. I used method two with an installation disk and changed it to do it on the system drive. To get the system drive letter look for a 100mb partition allocated before your os drive. All other partitions that are not the system drive (whether system is c or the 100 mb) should be inactive in my case but if you are dual booting it might not be for you but my guess is that it is because I read that a dynamic disk can only have one active drive (i dont think other os boots in a converted basic drive will work an anymore without some help)....I didnt research that so I don't know. [IU]Another thing that I read that was incorrect was that only basic drive partitions can be set as active.[/U] I was able to set a partition on a dynamic drive as active. That being said I base that on the fact it took the command via diskpart and "detail partition" showed it as active when I finished. Also if you set drive c as active and you did have the 100mb system drive and you ran the bootrec commands you may have written the new boot info to the C: which technically if set as active will bypass the system drive and if you get it working this way it will negate your system drive. It would work but would not be correct. I had to backup BCD and delete the C:\boot folder on C:\ then run /RebuildBcd as explained in bootrec link I gave above. Most of the bootsec commands will operate on whatever drive you have set as active.

2. Yes you can convert the OS disk and system disk to dynamic and you can mirror both the system 100mb partition and the OS C: partition. I converted my wifes drive C: and system reserved drive to dynamic, I also converted a matching drive to dynamic then I mirrored drive c to the unallocated matching drive. At first I did not mirror the system 100mb drive because the mirror option was not available...more on that later. Now this did cause my system not to boot but I believe that was only because the main drive was on a higher sata port and the matching mirrored drive on the lower port did not have the system boot and bios wanted to boot whatever ended up at disk 0. With two drive c's it got confusing. I can't confirm that for sure (although everything worked once I fixed the port and fixed what was active) but tried the whole litany of bootrec () commands and none of them worked until I realized the bios was trying to boot the disk without the system drive (boot config) and I set the wrong drive as active.
3. The people saying this are listening to people that are saying #2. Converting back to basic does restore the drive for some people but leaves you not reaching your end goal. There is a way to restore to basic without data loss if you really want to give up.
4. Please don't ever listen to anyone that says this for 98% of computer issues until you have exhausted all options and asked an expert..paid if need be.

Mirroring System Drive: I was able to mirror the system drive (100mb drive) but I had to delete an OEM partition first as it needed to go to the beginning of the drive like the main drive. Once that was deleted and the whole drive was unallocated I was able to mirror both the system drive and os C: drive. Don't use the clean all method to delete it unless you want to wait a while or you want to zero it out.

In summary my issues and wrong steps were:
SATA PORT: System Drive (whether the os drive or the dedicated system drive) was on a higher sata port and my computer tried to boot the mirrored drive that didnt have a boot record which ended up booting into a black screen with a blinking curser. When I fixed that active drive issue the SATA port issue then had the bootrec commands say No Element Found
Active Drive: I accidentally set the C: drive as active. Then the bootrec commands complained of no system drive or 0 / no operating systems found or total identified windows installations 0.
I was running bootsec commans in vain because of the wrong active drive set.

Errors I encountered:
At boot black screen with blinking curser. Happened when sata port was wrong. Could happen for wrong active drive too I am not sure.
System partition not found when running bootrec commands. I think this was when my system drive was no longer the active drive as well and maybe when using the wrong sata port.
No OS's found when running bootrec /ScanOs and /FixBoot also same as above. See Bootrec 2 link. (Delete bcd first then rebuild)
Element not found: Wrong SATA Port see Bootrec 2 link.

When I had the wrong active drive I could tell finally because I learned about the 100mb partition and relazed I set C as active. Then I realized the sata port error due to bootrec commands giving the errors I mentioned and I had a 60 mb unallocated space on the second drive and I finally realized that was the drive at drive 0. It kept being assigned to drive 0 no matter what was set as active. Then I just did the bootrec /rebuildbcd once after manually backing up and deleted the wrong bcd and /boot on C:, then automatic system repair about 2 times. All worked after that.

Then I just destroyed the mirror, deleted the oem partition on the 2nd drive, then changed the drive to unallocated space. The mirrored the system and os partitions. Voila perfect!

Honestly if I had just tried to boot into the plex2 installation in the beginning it probably would have worked and I never would have had such a problem.

So now my wifes computer is bootable with dual mirrored dynamic disks and both the system reserved 100mb drive and the os drive C: are mirrored.

I hope my story is helpful.

 

[Expansion]

I've just "managed" to convert the partitions from basic to dynamic(without informing myself before the operation), and now the PC doesn't start anymore.
I had:

System partition 100MB
C: Windows 7 x64 34GB
D: MyData 100GB
E: MyData 100GB

Any ideas on how can I bring it back to life?

I've tried System Repair from Win7 DVD, but after a night of trying to repair, it didn't finish and it didn't look like it was actually doing something. I tried to cancel but it said that the operation cannot be cancelled. I had to force shutdown the PC.

 

[Brink]

Hello Expansion,

I take it you converted the OS drive to dynamic causing this?

If you have another computer that you can use, you could connect the drive to it, and use Option One in the tutorial below convert the disk back to basic without losing anything.

:ar: Convert a Dynamic Disk to a Basic Disk - Windows 7 Help Forums

 

[Expansion]

Yes, the conversion of the partitions from from basic to dynamic caused this.
The problem is the following now:

I took a different HDD and I've installed Windows 7 on it. I've also connected the unbootable HDD. In My Computer, the old C: and another partition that I've created after the conversion to dynamic, aren't "openable". Explorer crashes if I click on them.
Partition Wizard stays at splash-screen, with CPU at 25%(4core CPU), never gets to load, probably because of those 2 partitions.

LE: Actually, Partition Wizard has just loaded, after an hour of splash-screen. Let me see what I can do.

LE3: Partition Wizard Free doesn't allow conversion from dynamic to basic.

 

[mjf]

LE3: Partition Wizard Free doesn't allow conversion from dynamic to basic.

This is true for the latest version of Partition Wizard (free). The link in the tutorial is for an older version (4.2 free) which did allow dynamic to basic conversion before they moved the option to the paid version.