Solved Converting Dynamic drive to Basic drive without data loss.

[Reverse]

I recently installed an SSD in my system, as I was clearing off my secondary disk I messed something up on it. My secondary drive is a 1tb WD Black that had 3 partitions. It had the 100mb System Reserved, a 75gb partition that contained my Windows 7 install and all necessary drivers, and the remaining 856gb was a Data partition that contained everything else (games, pics, music, files...)

I went through my Windows partition and got everything out of it that I needed. When it came to the System partition, i figured I didnt need it anymore so I deleted the volume and extended the 856gb partition. This turned the drive into a Dynamic drive. When I saw this it didnt look right to me so I tried to me so I deleted the 100mb volume again.

This is where everything went wrong. The file system is gone and both the 100mb and 856gb volumes are unusable. Disk Management says they are unformatted and are RAW.

I have tried a bunch of different programs, partition managers, recovery programs, lots of them. Im not really sure what Im doing though, Im not sure the steps that I need to take to fix this.

I think I need to convert it back to a Basic drive, then rebuild the MBR. Ive never had hard drive issues like this so its all brand new territory for me.

My original post about this issue was on another forum and can be found here with more pictures and steps that I have taken.
Deleted NTFS file system, need to restore

 

[Brink]

Hell Reverse, and welcome to Seven Forums.

You might see if you may be able to use OPTION ONE or OPTION TWO in the tutorial below to be able to convert the disk from dynamic back to basic without losing any data.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/26829-convert-dynamic-disk-basic-disk.html

Hope this helps for now,
Shawn

 

[Reverse]

With Partition Wizard 4.2 I get an error

When I use EaseUS Partition Manager, the only Operations available for that disk are "Surface Test" and "View Properties" If I click on the F: partition, the only option available for it is "Delete Volume"

 

[Brink]

You might see if you may be able to recovery the data on the RAW F: partition using EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free. It'll allow you up to 1 GB recovery free.

Instructions: Raw Recovery: Recover files from Raw Partitions, Hard Disk Drive, Memory card, SD Card. Raw File System Recovery Software.

If successful in recovering all of your data off of it, then you could just clean Disk 2 to start over with it.

 

[Reverse]

I tried that on Saturday, it came up with something like 80 partitions and I could only look at 4 at a time. It took something like 4 hours to search the drive and most of what showed up on the few that I looked at was from the Windows drive. I guess I need to rerun it and make it search only the F drive.

 

[Brink]

Yeah, only searching the F drive will help narrow it down and hopefully save you some time.

 

[Reverse]

If you delete one volume from a dynamic disk, does it delete the entire disk? When this all started, I deleted the 100mb partition after it was changed to dynamic. This caused the issues.


Update-
I was able to convert it from dynamic to basic disk by using a Hex editor.

 

[Brink]

Good. Were you able to recover your files?

 

[Reverse]

Working on that now. Some of the recovery tools Ive tried say "Cannot read boot sector" and do nothing. Ive tried rebuilding the MBR.

This is where Im at now.

 

[whs]

I would also try a live Linux CD or stick. Linux is less fuzzy for reading disks.

 

[jumanji]

Hi Reverse,

I am glad to note that you used Hex editor to change the dynamic disk to basic. That of course is one of the easiest things one should try first. You probably changed one byte 42 to 07. Right? Now I am just curious to know whether you did it for the third partition also? ( Since you had three partitions, you would have seen three strings of 16 byte length partition data. Since partition 1 and 3 were showing RAW, did you change 42 to 07 in both partition no.1 and partition no.3?)

Usually, when it is a single partition and you change 42 to 07 in the only partition string you see, the drive will immediately change to basic, and not only that it will show the correct format also, say NTFS and you will be able to access it with no further action.

In your case that did not happen that is why I am wondering whether changing the byte for the third partition also could have made it and resolved your problem.

Anyway, that is only a post-mortem, and now that your whole drive shows RAW, you may use two approaches to see whether you can access the drive.

1. Boot from a live Linux CD/pendrive

2. try Partition Recovery Wizard in the recent version of Partition Wizard again

 

[Reverse]

Hi Reverse,

I am glad to note that you used Hex editor to change the dynamic disk to basic. That of course is one of the easiest things one should try first. You probably changed one byte 42 to 07. Right? Now I am just curious to know whether you did it for the third partition also? ( Since you had three partitions, you would have seen three strings of 16 byte length partition data. Since partition 1 and 3 were showing RAW, did you change 42 to 07 in both partition no.1 and partition no.3?)

Usually, when it is a single partition and you change 42 to 07 in the only partition string you see, the drive will immediately change to basic, and not only that it will show the correct format also, say NTFS and you will be able to access it with no further action.

In your case that did not happen that is why I am wondering whether changing the byte for the third partition also could have made it and resolved your problem.

Anyway, that is only a post-mortem, and now that your whole drive shows RAW, you may use two approaches to see whether you can access the drive.

1. Boot from a live Linux CD/pendrive

2. try Partition Recovery Wizard in the recent version of Partition Wizard again

I did not have 3 lines of Hex Data. Im not really sure why, but there was only one line. I changed it to 7, rebooted, and it showed up as a single drive. Im not quite sure why it did this, but it worked nonetheless. 1c0 was the only line that was populated.

I was able to read the drive with Minitool Power Data Recovery. I havnt started sorting through it, but after a 3 hours scan my files were intact, at least many of them. Its a lot of stuff to sort through, and Im not even sure what Im looking for because most of my photos and important stuff is backed up. Im mostly just worried about those few things that do not come to mind until after I reformat the drive and set it back up.

 

[jumanji]

Yep, in the current status I see only one partition string. ( It may be because you had already used many partitioning/recovery programs including rebuild MBR. I only wish you had backed up the first sector before trying any of it.)

Notwithstanding, you can be rest assured that all your data is still there.

While I do not recommend aborting any recovery process that you have already initiated - let it complete, I would still recommend you try the Partition Recovery Wizard in the latest version of MiniTools Partition Wizard.

Do a Quick scan and if it does not find the partitions, do a Full scan. If all the partitions are found, you will see it reflected in the disk map. If it does reflect your original disk partitions, then you can safely apply the changes and it will rewrite the partition table in the first sector and you should be able to see and access your disk as before ( since it has already become a basic disk)

If it succeeds, nothing like that for you can straight away access your disk, without needing to recover and copy elsewhere.

If it does not, and you are not happy with MiniTools Power Data Recovery which you are running now, you can look into using a Live Linux CD/pendrive - does not take much time to make one- and then PhotoRec.

 

[Reverse]

Yep, in the current status I see only one partition string. ( It may be because you had already used many partitioning/recovery programs including rebuild MBR. I only wish you had backed up the first sector before trying any of it.)

Notwithstanding, you can be rest assured that all your data is still there.

While I do not recommend aborting any recovery process that you have already initiated - let it complete, I would still recommend you try the Partition Recovery Wizard in the latest version of MiniTools Partition Wizard.

Do a Quick scan and if it does not find the partitions, do a Full scan. If all the partitions are found, you will see it reflected in the disk map. If it does reflect your original disk partitions, then you can safely apply the changes and it will rewrite the partition table in the first sector and you should be able to see and access your disk as before ( since it has already become a basic disk)

If it succeeds, nothing like that for you can straight away access your disk, without needing to recover and copy elsewhere.

If it does not, and you are not happy with MiniTools Power Data Recovery which you are running now, you can look into using a Live Linux CD/pendrive - does not take much time to make one- and then PhotoRec.

Yes, I rebuilt the MBR after I got it converted. Ive got Partition Recovery running on it right now like you suggested.

 

[Reverse]

Ive ran Minitools Power Data Recovery as well as EaseUS Data Recovery on the drive. I cant find anything that I dont have backed up so Im going to wipe it and get it usable again.

Big thanks to everyone for the advice.

 

[jumanji]

Glad to know that you successfully confirmed that you have no data to be lost, by whatever means you adopted.

To safeguard against problems of this nature where the HDD turns turtle due a corrupted first sector, I would recommend that you back up the first sector of all your internal and external HDDs. It is easy then to restore the first sector and bring it back to the original condition.

You may use MBR Backup 2.0 MBR Backup 2.0 Released | TrojanHunter Blog for that.



Note: The backed up first sector pertains to that particular partition setup. If you change the partition setup you must take a fresh backup and discard the old one.