Disk management converted only disk to dynamic, will it boot?

[Twiglets]

Hi, I was going to try dual booting Windows 8 on my laptop following a guide I found, and it said to go onto disk manager and shrink a volume to create another volume. The guide after the shrink only had two disks, and I had 5 disks (A recovery disk, HP tools and a blank one, along with my C disk, and the newly made one, named Windows 8 which I have now gotten rid of), after creating the other volume, it said about converting to a dynamic disk, I thought this was normal and clicked okay. After this I researched into dynamic and basic disks and found that only basic disks can contain a volume which is "active", where the BIOS boots Windows from, but because I converted the basic disk to a dynamic, the volume labelled active now doesn't display that it is active. (The guide's disk still said basic)
So now I am worried that my laptop won't boot, so I keep putting it into sleep mode (open and closing it) because this doesn't require BIOS. Please tell me whether it is safe to turn off my computer and turn it back on, I can't afford it not to work.

Here is a picture of my current and only disk on my laptop:

One more thing, I'm sure that the one which said active before was the one with no name on the left.

Thanks for reading
Twiglets

 

[bassfisher6522]

From what I've read, the only major difference with dynamic disc's is that it's more flexible, in that it allows you more options in manipulating the disc itself. See link. You are fine with either setup.

Basic Storage Versus Dynamic Storage in Windows XP

 

[Twiglets]

Thanks for the reply, I think that Windows 7 is different to XP to do with disks.

The problem that I think I am having is, that for Windows to load from the BIOS, one my partitions need to be marked as "active", but Dynamic disks can't be marked as active, only basic disks can, and converting Dynamic disks back to basic disks can be quite complicated. I haven't tried rebooting, but I can't afford to if it doesn't turn back on.

I'm not sure about the whether Windows will load from boot from Dynamic Disks.

 

[Arc]

At first you copy all your data, externally; before shutting down the PC. You are right that the dynamic disk will not boot .

But, if you convert the disk back to basic again, it will wipe up everything there, not only data (so you are to back those up externally) but also the partitions. That means, you are to go for a clean install. Do you have a installation disk ?

 

[gregrocker]

I'd use free Partition Wizard bootable CD version 4.2 which is the only non-destructive method and the last PW version in which Conversion to Basic is free: pw422.zip ISO - Windows Live.

Follow these video steps: How to convert dynamic disk to basic disk with Partition Wizard?

 

[essenbe]

In order to recover your data you can try to copy/paste from the recovery console. A very good tutorial.