Dynamic Drives

[huffman]

I have installed Windows 7 and used it to partiton the 300 gb hard drive while installing windows. There are four partitions:

C - 50 gb
D - 50 gb
E - 100 gb
G - 100 gb

What I had not noticed was that all the drives are Dynamic even the System Reseve (100MB) is dynamic.

What made me notice this was when I tried to use Acronis to make images of the drives. Acronis does not support dynamic drives.

The first thing I tried was to reinstall Win 7 and remove the drives and repartion. Unfortunately I do not get the option now to delete the partitions and start over.

I then tried the tutorial to convert dynamic disk to basic disk at:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/26829-convert-dynamic-disk-basic-disk.html

None of the options to change from dynamic to basic show up on disk management or using the command prompt.

Except for Acronis, everything seems to work fine but I sure would like to be able to use Acronis. If anyone has a solution to fix this I sure would appreciate any information.

Thanks

 

[Tews]

There are several thrid party programs available to do this... Personally, I would download gparted ... if worse comes to worse, delete the existing partitions and start over...

 

[Qdos]

Doesn't your version of Acronis TrueImage have a built in disk sanitizer?

 

[huffman]

I did not see anything in Acronis as far as a disk sanitizer. To tell I would have to reinstall it which is not a big deal.

I have looked Gparted before and looked at the tutorial again after downloading Gparted .4.8-7. It does mention almost all types of partition formats but dynamic was NOT one of them.

I have also checked on several other sanitizers such as autoclave, east-tec, Paragon Diskwiper, Wipe Drive Pro etc and as far as I can tell they all wipe data but as far as changing dynamic to basic disks I did not see anything.

One thing I had thought of was to install Win XP and see if it would allow me to format the partitions again. The hard thing about this is will the MB support installing XP without finding the drives for XP. Believe me this is a weird little PC . There are no IDE connections everything is USB driven and has a Sata HDD.

Thanks for the input and anything further would be appreciated.

 

[bww]

You can download a freeware program, Partition Wizard, it will convert from dynamic to basic and it works, I have used it.

 

[huffman]

Thanks for the information on Partition Wizard. I guess took the chicken way out and contacted the HDD manufacturer and got their software to restore the drive back to factory specifications and then reinstalled windows.

I still wish I knew why Win 7 formatted the partitions as dynamic instead of basic. That is PITA.

Anyway thanks for the help.