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I have a laptop hard disk , which I use with SATA to USB 3.0 connector to use as external hard disk . Using windows disk management I converted the dynamic disk of laptop to basic disk. Now I have lost all the partition and not is as an unallocated disk. 1. How to get back the dynamic partition back without loosing data. 2. Any way to recover the data.

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  • How exactly did you convert it to basic? Oct 26, 2015 at 16:14
  • You are a laptop hard disk?
    – qasdfdsaq
    Oct 26, 2015 at 16:19
  • In windows disk management It had an option to convert to dynamic disk to basic disk .
    – Jubilee r
    Oct 26, 2015 at 17:27
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    It sounds like you may have altered the partition structure, although it could very well be that the filesystem volume is still okay, or perhaps mostly in tact (maybe missing just the first half-kilobyte). In that case, much of the data may be very recoverable. Converting back might perform more writing to the disk, possibly destroying some of the recoverable data. Making a disk image is highly recommended if you have the resources for that. Do you have your important data backed up?
    – TOOGAM
    Oct 26, 2015 at 18:24
  • @TOOGAM : Unfortunately I didnt take any back up . You are right I think conversion of dynamic to basic disk has messed up the partition table.
    – Jubilee r
    Oct 27, 2015 at 14:33

1 Answer 1

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Hate to say it, but you're kinda screwed. You can download Hiren's Boot CD and try that. It has lots of good utilities for data recovery. Unfortunately, you're at the point of attempting to rescue individual files rather than trying to restore the partitions.

You indicated in your comments that you converted the disk back to basic using Microsoft's own Disk Management console. Disk Management will not allow you to convert a disk back to basic unless there are no partitions on it. That indicates to me that the partitions were already screwed up before you did the conversion.

Unfortunately, Dynamic Disks are a proprietary Microsoft technology, so good luck finding any tools that can work with them. Linux can mount volumes on Dynamic Disks, but that depends on the data structures being intact. There are no mechanisms for repairing them if they're broken like your case.

Hiren's has tools like TestDisk and PhotoRec that can operate on RAW devices, but it's doubtful you'd be able to recover the partitions intact. You'd have to just let it scan for file signatures and hope it can recover data out of the raw data stream that is now your hard disk.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. This is why it's important to have good backups.

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  • I'm upvoting answer which has several good tidbits. Since Dynamic Disks are proprietary, there may be fewer tools that support them. I don't even know how likely/possible it is to recover the partition. Remaking a partition of the exact same size, on another disk, and then copying just the header info is quite a long shot, likely to take some time and produce no results. Professional services that are actually capable of extracting this data is likely to be extremely expensive because of efforts may require non-standardized tools/approaches. This sad reality is probably why so little feedback
    – TOOGAM
    Oct 27, 2015 at 18:08
  • @TOOGAM: Recovering the entire partition should be easily possible, but will not be possible "in pace" - you can recover the partition as an image to another disk though. It's a lot easier than you think.
    – qasdfdsaq
    Oct 28, 2015 at 13:53

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