Converting disks to Dynamic Volumes = no boot

[FuriousGeorge]

I've done this twice in a row now, so I'm sure it's not a fuke:

I install windows 7, convert the disks to Dynamic Disks, and try to reboot. THe result is that the system hangs right after it would normally check to boot from the DVD drives, and before it would start booting Windows.

The screen goes all black, and I'm left with a blinking cursor in the top left. I don't get any error message.

I've tried using system repair on the boot cd, but the "Startup Repair" app tells me that there is nothing wrong.

Happily, I see that unlike earlier versions of WinOS, 7 does seem to support DYnamic Disks to some extent. I am currently reinstalling the OS to see if it can happily coexist with DD now.

One thing that concerns me is that my partition table seems to have changed unexpectedly:

Disk 0 Before:
Partition 1 - 100 MB system reserved
Partition 2 - 46GB C:\
Partition 3 - Blah
Partition 4 - Blah

Disk 0 After:
Partition 2 - Partition 1 - 100 MB system reserved
Partition 3 - 46GB C:\
Partition 4 - Blah
Partition 5 - Blah

This probably explains the booting difficulty to some extent...

I guess the next thing I'll try is creating the dynamic disks and rebooting before I set up any other partitions. Then I will try to reboot after every step...

OR...

I could install a third HD which is not part of the dynamic disks.... hmmmm.....

Any suggestions or insights are much appreciated

 

[win7clutz]

Why would you convert your primary disk to dynamic? They're not bootable...

 

[FuriousGeorge]

I was about to tell you that you were misinformed, but I just realized that every other time I've installed DD I've had linux on the system, and used Grub as the boot loader...

Curiously, when you convert to DD it tells you something like "Other OSs will not be bootable", but I inferred from that message that WinOS still would be.

I know for a fact that other OS' do in fact boot from dynamic disks. Ironically, it's WinOS that does not.

I'll forgive it that, though. It's grown up so much since '95 that I don't want to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Thanks for the response.