I posted this question in answers.Microsoft.com and it was recommended that it be posted here instead. If this is posted in the wrong category could you please move it to the appropriate category. The one reply I received said that I cannot convert to a dynamic disk without losing everything that is on that disk but just finished reading an article on MS website saying that the current partitions would be converted to simple volumes on the new dynamic disk and would still be bootable so would appreciate clarification or confirmation. The issues of concern are those listed below and the primary one is whether the conversion will keep all of my info including the recovery partition (or equivalent volume on the dynamic disk), OS and still be bootable as mentioned below

According to Intel my laptop has RAID capability built into the chipset but it would seem Samsung has disabled it as there is no settings in the BIOS. In doing some reading it would appear there is a software RAID built into Windows 8.1, or at least driver mirroring which is what I want. It is also my understanding that you have to have the drive as a dynamic drive and mine is currently basic, so need to know;

1. Does the drive have to be changed to dynamic in order to use mirroring?
2. Can I convert my bootable drive with the OS and all of my data to dynamic without any data loss, and will it retain the recovery partition that has been provided for recovery purposes?
3 Is there any downside to having the disk as a dynamic instead of a basic, and if not why are all disks simply not dynamic to start with?
4. Is using this type of mirroring the same as a hardware RAID 1 where if one drive fails the other can be used without any interruption and will be bootable?


One other thing, is the program to check your computer for compatibility with Windows 8 still available? I did a search and everything I found said it was no longer available. I purchased Windows 8 when first released with the $39.95 special price and have an older Vista laptop I would like to use it on if it is compatible but can't find the program to run that checks for compatibility. Also would I be able to upgrade from Vista to 8 and maintain my data or programs or would I have to do a complete fresh install?

Thank you.

• Edited by jackdup Saturday, January 03, 2015 5:26 PM

Well I just converted both drives to dynamic and both were successful. I
exited Disk Management and reentered and it showed both drives as dynamic and
both as healthy. It also showed drive C as system or boot or something like that
however when right clicking mirroring was not shown on the menu. I shut down and
restarted however as soon as it started to reboot there was a message saying
Preparing Automatic Repair and then Diagnosing PC and then Attempting
repairs.

Then I get a message saying automatic repair couldn't repair your PC with two
options, shut down and advance options. Selecting advance options brings up
another screen with three choices. The first is continue which if you select it
it just reboots. The third option is turn off your PC. The second option is
troubleshoot and selecting it brings up another screen giving three choices,
Refresh your PC, Reset your PC and advanced options. I don't want to have to
reinstall all of my software which I would assume I would have to do if I select
either of the first two options but would appreciate if someone could confirm
that. The third option is again advance options which takes you to another
screen with six options. System restore, System Image recovery, Startup repair,
Command prompt, UEFI Firmware and Startup settings.

Selecting system restore brings up an error saying system restore could not
find the offline boot volume. Please insure it is currently accessible.

I don't have an image recovery, startup repair does not solve the problem.

Selecting command prompt and then going to drive c: shows a 16 GB partition
named Samsung Rec 2. Going to Drive d: shows Samsung Rec which is 325 MB, so assume these two partitions were the recovery partitions. It
would appear the original system partition that had all of my files as well as
the system files, in other words the primary partition on drive c is now drive
X so am not sure if that is the reason it is not booting or what I need to do to
make it bootable again.

Thank you

• Edited by jackdup Friday, February 06, 2015 8:45 PM

If this is in the incorrect forum could you please move it to the appropriate forum. Thank you

I wanted to use drive mirroring which requires converting the disks to dynamic so posted the following to be sure I understood the consquences and was assured I could convert the drives and not lose any date and the drives would still be bootable.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/4540380b-50bf-42dc-a3c0-31684509b984/converting-basic-disk-to-dynamic-without-losing-data?forum=w8itproinstall

Well I just converted both drives to dynamic and both were successful. I
exited Disk Management and reentered and it showed both drives as dynamic and
both as healthy. It also showed drive C as system or boot or something like that
however when right clicking mirroring was not shown on the menu. I shut down and
restarted however as soon as it started to reboot there was a message saying
Preparing Automatic Repair and then Diagnosing PC and then Attempting
repairs.

Then I get a message saying automatic repair couldn't repair your PC with two
options, shut down and advance options. Selecting advance options brings up
another screen with three choices. The first is continue which if you select it
it just reboots. The third option is turn off your PC. The second option is
troubleshoot and selecting it brings up another screen giving three choices,
Refresh your PC, Reset your PC and advanced options. I don't want to have to
reinstall all of my software which I would assume I would have to do if I select
either of the first two options but would appreciate if someone could confirm
that. The third option is again advance options which takes you to another
screen with six options. System restore, System Image recovery, Startup repair,
Command prompt, UEFI Firmware and Startup settings.

Selecting system restore brings up an error saying system restore could not
find the offline boot volume. Please insure it is currently accessible.

I don't have an image recovery, startup repair does not solve the problem.

Selecting command prompt and then going to drive c: shows a 16 GB partition
named Samsung Rec 2. Going to Drive d: shows Samsung Rec which is 325 MB, so assume these two partitions were the recovery partitions. It
would appear the original system partition that had all of my files as well as
the system files, in other words the primary partition on drive c is now drive
X so am not sure if that is the reason it is not booting or what I need to do to
make it bootable again.

Thank you

• Merged by Karen HuMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Thursday, February 12, 2015 8:33 AM duplicate

From that CMD (your X drive is a ramdisk in WinPE) run these commands:

diskpart
sel disk 0
list part

Post the output.

Allot of this is over my head as I have not done a lot at the operating system level for many many years and that was back in the DOS days which are obviously much different. As your test drive is still set to Basic is it possible that converting to Dynamic creates an extra partition or two for some reason? One of the extra partitions is a dynamic reserved and is very small at 1024 KB so it would seem possible it is created during the conversion but that is just complete speculation on my part. Had I expected any problems I would have taken more notice of the drive configuration prior to the conversion. 

No I didn't do anything out of the ordinary before or after. I have not done anything relating to additional partitions, resizing of partitions or anything similar. On my HP computer I have a visible second partition with the recovery information but on the Samsung only one partition was every visible and that was the main partition. According to Intel the chipset is supposed to support hardware RAID but it would seem Samsung must have disabled it as it is not an option in the BIOS. I have RAID setup on my desktop and really like it so wanted to do the same on the Samsung, so after I found that hardware RAID was not an option I looked for other alternatives and found the mirroring option. I did some reading and then posted the original post above to insure I was aware of the potential consequences as I had read that you cannot switch from dynamic back to basic without deleting everything on the drive first, so wanted to be sure I would not lose any data by converting to dynamic and wanted to confirm the drive would be bootable after the conversion. From new I have simply installed my programs and used the computer normally without doing anything an the operating system level or any tinkering or fiddling of any kind before or after the conversion. When I converted I simply right clicked on the drive selected convert to dynamic disk. There were definitely no errors or messages of any kind indicating there may have been a problem. After not being able to boot I did not perform any operations that would change anything only things like we did to get a list of the partitions. I went to a command prompt and tried a few different letters to see what drives/volumes or partitions I could find. As mentioned above there was C and D and X but did not go through the whole alphabet either as X had all of my data as that was my main concern that my data was intact. I posted my problem here and after not receiving a reply the next day put the drive in my desktop simply to see what Disk Management showed and to copy all of my data just in case, but again know enough not to experiment or try anything that might not be reversible or that could result in making things worse and wanted to wait for some advice from someone much more knowledgeable than myself.

So just to summarize the drive has never been altered in anyway from it's factory original configuration aside from the upgrade to 8.1 and the dynamic conversion, neither of which gave any errors of any type.

Thank you

PS If you look at my screen capture from Disk Management it only shows 6 partitions and only one of them is noted as dynamic which is E, the main partition. It would be interesting to see what Disk Management shows after conversion to dynamic or from a dynamic disk that is bootable just for comparison.

• Edited by jackdup Thursday, February 12, 2015 4:56 PM

It is certainly possible to have a bootable dynamic disk. Think about this, you have the ability to boot to your Repair screen... this is stored in another partition. Your problem is different. You want to boot your Windows 8.1, as it exists, from this dynamic disk.

I was able to convert my disk to Dynamic by using Diskpart in a WinPE. Problems now exist:
- cannot boot to Windows 8.1
- can boot to WinRE
- cannot run recovery as it says the partition where Windows is installed to is locked.
- it created a 1MB partition called Dynamic Reserved. It does not contain a volume.
- the recovery partition (location of recovery image) now shows RAW as the file system.
- BCDEdit returns errors while trying to recreate the BCDStore
- Diskpart cannot create or remove partitions on a dynamic disk.

I looked at some third party tools that claim to be able to convert a Dynamic to Basic disk. They did not boot in UEFI mode, or shows no options available regarding the disk. Diskpart information post conversion:

DISKPART> sel disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list part

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Recovery           300 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    System             100 MB   301 MB
  Partition 3    Dynamic Reserved  1024 KB   401 MB
  Partition 4    Reserved           127 MB   402 MB
  Partition 5    Dynamic Data       105 GB   529 MB
  Partition 6    Recovery           451 MB   106 GB
  Partition 7    Recovery          5000 MB   106 GB

DISKPART> detail disk

Crucial_CT120M500SSD3
Disk ID: {049AE314-4DE1-43A1-A76E-28060A1FB77E}
Type   : SATA
Status : Online
Path   : 5
Target : 0
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : UNAVAILABLE
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only  : No
Boot Disk  : No
Pagefile Disk  : No
Hibernation File Disk  : No
Crashdump Disk  : No
Clustered Disk  : No

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 0     N   Windows      NTFS   Simple       105 GB  Healthy
  Volume 1         Windows RE   NTFS   Partition    300 MB  Healthy    Hidden
  Volume 2         SYSTEM       FAT32  Partition    100 MB  Healthy    Hidden
  Volume 3                      NTFS   Partition    451 MB  Healthy    Hidden
  Volume 4     E                RAW    Partition   5000 MB  Healthy    Hidden

The concept you attempted to employ is OLD: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302969

I suspect Windows 8.1 would boot from a Dynamic Disk but only in MBR. GPT is a no-go because 8.1 needs the other partitions which basically make it multi-boot system. This would require a total software reload and likely a bit of testing. It is moot-point if your notebook only supports UEFI boot.

I recommend you reinstall Windows normally. You will need to convert your disk back to Basic type, which will erase all information. You can do this with Diskpart:

select disk 0
clean

This will erase everything and revert the disk back to Basic type. You will then be able to reinstall Windows with your recovery media. NOTE: this step is needed as Windows Setup should give you an error saying it can't install on a dynamic disk.

• Edited by Tripredacus Thursday, February 12, 2015 9:20 PM

I guess I misunderstood dynamic drives as I had thought that the trend was moving toward dynamic drives rather than basic but if cannot be made to be bootable I am obviously wrong about that.

What is the advantage of a dynamic drive if it can not be bootable?

What is WinRE and Windows PE or what is the difference? Are they separate operating systems as well?

Thank you

• Edited by jackdup Saturday, February 14, 2015 9:12 PM

I have no experience with TestDisk. This topic is now likely beyond the scope of TechNet. You may be able to get further help here: http://reboot.pro/topic/20330-convert-boot-disk-to-dynamic-error/

I have no experience with TestDisk. This topic is now likely beyond the scope of TechNet. You may be able to get further help here: http://reboot.pro/topic/20330-convert-boot-disk-to-dynamic-error/

I am less concerned about using TESTDISK and simply would like to know whether each of the partitions listed in the above capture are primary, primary bootable, logical or extended as I need to mark them appropriately before trying to recover them. If you could offer guidance with that I would appreciate it.

Thanks again for all of your help.