I hate dynamic disks.

[LiamC]

I really do. They wasted my long weekend.

To cut a long story short, I decided to "upgrade" my system & convert my 160GB Samsung over to a 250. I'd forgotten that the 160 & 250 in place were dynamic disks.

Swap over motherboard from X2 to C2D etc. Boot drive is a Maxtor 15KII. That goes swimmingly. Connect disks--> Unreadable. WTF!!?

Try Ghost. Bad sectors. Just to get to a Ghost prompt required about 1.5 hours. O.K. Connect them back to the X2. Still unreadable. ARRRRGGGHHHHH! BTW, chkdsk and re-scan volumes did nothing. O.K., I'll Ghost them to a basic disk and run chkdsk. Ghosting took about 3~3.5 hours. Hurray! New Disk unreadable. Fuck!

Hunt around. Find out about DiskProbe. Change one lousy byte in one sector and machine now thinks disk is a basic disk. All files intact. hew.

I hate Microsoft. And if DiskProbe can convert disks from Dynamic to Basic, why can't the Disk Manager (which says if you do that, then all the data is toast)?

/rant.

 

[Bozo]

Why were you using dynamic disk? Just curious, as I always considered it way too risky.

Bozo :joker:

 

[LiamC]

I think it was the default creation scheme? Can't really remember. I learnt my lesson.

 

[Tannin]

I never, ever use them. Never learned to trust them - no special knowledge, just generalised fear and loathing. Seems like paranoia is indeed a reasonable basis for forming policy.

 

[Mercutio]

Dynamic disks have been around since Windows 2000 was in beta. Seven years, anyway. You would think that disk utilities would figure out how to work properly with them by now.

 

[ddrueding]

I use dynamic disks for my fileservers. Spanned arrays seem to work fine, even after an OS rebuild I was able to re-import the drives. I also have a number of dynamic mirrors I use at clients without issue.