Dynamic Drive HELP!!!

[akramy]

All, right here is the deal. I bought a new 60 gig IBM deskstar HDD sometime last year. I am using it as a primary slave for my files and downloads, so it is not my system drive. When I was playing around with win2k, I came across teh dynamic drive upgrade, figured it was "cool" and i did the upgrade, biggiest mistake of my life. it was downhill from there.
2 months later, I boot up my win2k and it is NOT recognizing my harddrive as being there. doesn't recognize the file system. i ended up reformating the system drive and started an installation from scratch. booted up and windows recognized the drive fine. only two months later or so, ran into the same problem, again. I installed winXP on a different partition, dual boot, and XP recognized the HDD. I ended up reinstalling win2k again. It was agrrivating, but I dealt with it. Then, I figued, why go thru the trouble, restore back to basic. So I backed up all my data on another computer, formated my win2k, fresh install, and I restored to basic. few days later, file system not recognized, again. I downloaded a utility that does a low-level format fromt IBM's website and performed a HDD check and it checked ok, and did a low-level format. Finally got it back to basic, thoguht I was pretty safe, next thing I know, I reboot win2k and again the hdd shows upin the computer mangment as unallocated space. I plugged it into another win2k machine and it came to be the same. I tried winXP and no luck there either.

My question is, once a HDD goes dynamic, is it permement? what can I do, anybody seen something like this before, I can't afford keep loosing data like that. IF anyone knows anything about this, PLEASE HELPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!! -akramy

 

[flynbrian99]

akramy-

Hopefully this helps...

Dynamic drives can be returned to basic storage by deleting all volumes and issuing the "Revert to Basic Disk" on the drive through the Disk Management Snap-in.

Reverting a disk to basic will destroy all data on that drive because you must delete the volumes first.

After you upgrade a basic disk to a dynamic disk, you cannot change the dynamic volumes back to partitions. Instead, you must delete all dynamic volumes on the disk and then use the Revert To Basic Disk command.

To change a dynamic disk back to a basic disk
1. Open Disk Management.
2. Right-see the dynamic disk you want to change back to a basic disk, and then see Revert To Basic Disk.
Notes
· You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings may also prevent you from completing this procedure.
· To open Disk Management, see Start, point to Settings, see Control Panel, double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management. In the console tree under Storage, see Disk Management.
· You must remove all volumes from the dynamic disk before you can change it back to a basic disk.
· Once you change a dynamic disk back to a basic disk, you can create only partitions and logical drives on that disk.