This saved me a 300 mile one way trip.  All i wanted to do was convert to HDD to dynamic so i could do a software raid!  thing never came back up :(  i had to walk my dad through hooking the HDD up to another computer and with the help from you guys it was all up and working!

Many thanks for this article. I was running xp pro on my home machine but had to downgrade to xp home as I ran out of licences. This meant that home could not read my dynamic drives, but this worked perfectly, thanks once again :)

I tried this and it only partially worked! I'm using a Win 2003 R2 server and after running the hack, rebooting a couple of times, in Computer Management the disk is showing off line and still dynamic. I cannot get it back online nor to show it as a basic disk. Any thoughts?

Thanks for the info but I've got a problem with Diskprobe.  When I go to "open physical drive" there are no drives listed, and both Handle 0 and 1 say "NO_SELECTION".  I've got 3 sata drives in the computer (one with the dynamic/offline problem).  The other 2 show up in "open logical drive," but again nothing under physical drive.  Any idea what I'm doing wrong or what to do to get diskprobe to see my drives?

Thanks

I had 2 old SATA drives from my old OS that were showing up "offline" in VHP. I followed the advice here, but I have the same problem as FrankyJ. I cannot get DiskProbe to list, view or recognize any drives. Checking "physical Drive", "logical Volume" or "Volume Information' shows "no physical or logical drive open". None of the other options will function when no drive is open. I had high hopes for this hack, however I was unable to get it to work on my version of VHP. In my case, I used Vista Ult without a product key to view both dynamic drives and copy the data to a basic disc. I then rebooted in VHP and I have my data on a new disc. I will have to format both dynamic discs.

Cujet

I followed the directions for this hack to the letter. I could not get Diskprobe to open or view any of my "offline" SATA drives. I believe I have the same problems as FrankyJ. None of the pull down options in Diskprobe allow any action, because there is no drive to select.

I ended up somewhat resolving the problem be loading Ultimate Vista without a product key. I was then able to access my 2 distinct dynamic discs and transfer the data. However, I am back with Vista Home Premium and cannont figure out a way to make this hack work.

Chris

dskprobe found 2 "42" lines - first I changed line1, rebooted, disk was seen but "unformatted" - then I changed line 2, same, was "unformatted" too. So I used free TestDisk tool http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Main_Page to recover the partition - which it did instantly and successfully.

So this is just perfect. :-)

This article save me so much work.

I had a little bit of trouble.  I like others above could not run DskProbe correctly on my Vista HP machine.  It would not me select a physical drive as the list was empty.  I fired up my old XP Pro and did the conversion amd now I use the drives just fine in my external usb to sata unit.

This didn't fix things for me but a combination of TestDisk and PhotoRec did!  Thanks to FredT for the link.  At first TestDisk showed three different partitions when I had had only one and saw the disk as 137GB instead of 400GB.  I ran a partition discovery but that didn't find anything.  I then ran PhotoRec and started a file recovery but canceled it when I realized I didn't have enough space for a full file recovery on my other drive.  At that point all of a sudden it was showing the disk as 400GB.  Then I went back in TestDisk and ran a partition discovery again and this time it found the partition and wrote the new partition table to disk.  One reboot later I had my data back!

Gotta love free open source software!

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I attempted this two days ago and so far, no success.  I changed the entry from 42 to 07 as instructed.  I rebooted and have not been able to log in since.  I did get a login screen (and an error message that a service failed to start).  But when I attempt to log in, it acts like it wants to log in....several windows flash by ending up back at the Windows "Ctrl Alt Delete" login/splash screen.  Does this in standard and safe mode.  I have Windows 2003 R2 installed.  I decided to try and run chkdsk from the Windows install disk under repair mode, but it of course doesn't see the partition.

I then tried TestDisk utility as brought up by users.  No luck.  In fact, at one point it told me to run Chkdsk (can't do that if I can't get to the partition).  After working with it, the system wouldn't even boot to the login screen.  Instead, it would reboot after the Windows 2003 splash screen (and about 3 bars).  I managed to get the system back to the point where it gives the login splash screen by restoring a partial backup (turns out that the last part of my backup has media issues).  

Next, I decided to run try the Windows install disk again (in repair mode).  It now sees the partion, and allowed me to run chkdsk /p/r.  But, no change in boot up.  Any ideas?

Hi

First of all I understand that what I did was very stupid, and I'm not going to do it again.

Can somebody PLEASE help me recover my hard drive?

Basically;

I was trying to install Windows 7 beta without having to go buy a DVD burner, so I extracted to my secondary hardrive and tried to boot into it (to install it on my primary one). Kept getting the error about please insert bootable media or whatever it says (I don't remember sorry). I thought maybe it was because it was a dynamic drive instead of basic so it would only work once windows loaded or something, so I tried the steps in this article to turn it into a basic one.

The thing is I have the 64bit version of XP, so WindowsXP-KB838079-SupportTools-ENU.exe refused to install. So I just opened it in 7zip and grabbed dskprobe.exe and dskprobe.cnt from it.

I opened the drive I had windows on (as read only) and did sectors>read

It had this in it http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/3495/clipboard01tv6.png

And then opened up the secondary drive (which had http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/345/clipboard02dj2.png in it) and did sector>write to make it a basic drive

Then I restarted my computer and put that drive first in boot priority. Got an error about boot configuration file or file. I think it said something about bootcfg.

So I changed my main drive back to first priority to book back into windows.. the loading bar goes across once, starts to go again, and then my computer just instantly restarts itself.

It restarts when I choose safe mode, to.

I unplug my secondary hardrive, and everything is fine again, my computer boots up normally.

So somehow the change to my secondary hardrive is preventing my first one from booting.

But I have a lot of data stored on it that I need. Is there any way to recover it when Windows won't start unless I unplug it?

Leaving the power plug in it doesn't stop Windows from loading, but of course the drive doesn't show up either, and plugging the SATA cable into it after Windows has started does nothing. Tried using disk management to "reactive volume" but that doesn't work either.

Please somebody tell me how to get my data back.. I promise to never do something this stupid again :(

At the very least it would be nice to be able to use the drive again, even if I can't get the data back.. I can't exactly reformat it when Windows won't boot up with it plugged in, though.

P.S. I also used bootsect.exe /nt60 on the drive (before trying the dskprobe hack).

If it helps any, the messed up drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB, and the one my OS is on is some 34GB 15000RPM raptor that I can't remember the name of.

I'm not sure how to subscribe to this so if you could e-mail your response to AzuMao@gmail.com I would be very very very grateful.

I really hope I don't have to buy new hardware to fix this :( I'm broke..

Nevermind, got it working.

Thanks anyways ^^

Hello, first of all, thank you for this guide!

When I follow these steps, I get a message at the end that hasn't been mentioned here:

http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/5666/scrnu.jpg

I afraid doing something wrong, so I prefer to ask you before pressing this YES button. Is it normally that I get this message? Should I press YES?

Thanks in advance!

This article saved my butt with a few caveats that might help others that have posted here.

I also was in a "reboot loop"  hit ctrl+alt+del login flash back to login screen

The "C" and "E" drives were swapped - from the remote system go to start run \\servername\c$ and \\servername\datadrive$ to verify especially if you have more than one data drive

connect to the registry from another system

go to HKLM\system\mounteddevices   you will see \dosdevices\c: etc.

change the C: to a drive letter that is not in use

now change the drive back to C that needs to be ( in my case it was E: )

change the old C: to the correct data drive letter ( again, my case was E: )

B.I.N.G.O. I was able to login.  

now onto my next issue -

when I logged in and went to disk management my "C" drive showed as dynamic and offline - even after check disk /f  

I went back into the dskprobe and found another 42 in the row below 1c0 - changed that to 07 rebooted and all was well.

BTW: do not try to image your machine with dynamic disks - the new version of Acronis claims to handle dynamic disks but would not trust it.  Ghost also states to do partition backups - but I have had a lot of issues trying to restore from dynamic disks... ( stick to basic )