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Earlz
Asked: 2011-06-07 10:57:15 +0800 CST

Disk read error after converting basic disk to dynamic disk?

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I have a bit of an odd setup. Basically, originally in the server was an older lone 160G harddrive. We've decided to upgrade it to a RAID-1 mirrored 2 disk setup against two new 500G harddrives. It'd save a lot of time if we didn't have to reinstall server, so I decided I'd give cloning the disk a try. I can successfully clone it (manually using dd from an OpenBSD install disk). It works after that, but it has over 300G of unallocated space. I wanted it to just be one big parition, so I used GParted to resize the parition. It works after this, chkdisk runs without any kind of errors and such.

Then, when I try setting up this one drive to be a dynamic disk, it will say it must unmount and reboot the computer and such. Consistently, however, when it reboots I just get the error "A disk read error occurred. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart" or something along those lines. I've tried this 3 times, with the same thing each time.

Also, I'm aware of the needed 10M of unallocated space on the drive. I went ahead and left 100M just to be safe.

Is there anything obvious that would cause converting a perfectly fine basic disk to a dynamic disk to fail?

Also, I am using Windows Server 2003 Standard edition, 32 bit

hard-drive windows-server-2003 raid dynamic-disk

2 Answers

  1. I worked around this problem by instead of expanding the partition, I just convert it straight to a dynamic disk without messing with the partitions.

    However, I may have figured out how to of solved this. My theory is that you have to take a basic drive, convert it to dynamic. Then, you will get the read error. Now, you must manually copy the bootsector from a working and booting dynamic disk to the disk you just converted.

    It was with this way that I managed to get a mirrored drive to be bootable(which is a problem very popular on the internet apparently)

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  2. I had the same issue about 3 months ago - convert drive to dynamic rendered the drive unreadable. To fix this, I booted to a Win2008 server with the drive in another bay, and then used a hex editor to change the dynamic bit.

    I followed these instructions: http://thelazyadmin.com/blogs/thelazyadmin/archive/2007/01/17/Converting-Dynamic-Disks-Back-to-Basic-Disks.aspx

    This will revert your disk to basic, but it will be usable.

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