Unable to Detect Dynamic Disk Partition

[Jaiwanti]

hi there ...........

My configuration consists of two internal hard disks installed of which, one is of 80GB that contains the Operating System, and the other 160GB is used by me for storing all my necessary data. Few days back I had to format my first hard disk as Windows showed corrupted. After formatting I installed Windows XP again and all was working fine;unless and untill when i tried to open Windows Explorer i was unable to see my other hard disk which is of 160 GB which was a Dynamic disk.

[Hardwareman]

It sounds like you have a hard drive controller that Windows has no drivers for. These days, it's usually a SATA controller, but it might also be a RAID setup or an obscure product. You will need the drivers for it on a floppy disk. Also, make sure you press F6 when prompted during the Windows XP setup.

If you're not sure what to do, then please post your system's specifications so we can point you in the right direction.

[Maxforu]

the interleave was actually changed, I believe that's a lot like a low level format and all data is lost. Another common problem with ISA controller cards is a bad connection with the motherboard. If you have such a card, I'd recommend reseating it first.

[Killen]

If you attempt to run PartitionMagic on
a Windows 2000/XP Professional machine where the boot partition
the partition where Windows 2000/XP Professional is installed
is on a dynamic disk, you will receive the following error message:
"Init failed: Error 183. Unable to identify the Windows partition."
To solve this problem, Windows 2000/XP must be installed on a
basic disk."

[T.J.]

You can delete the drive letter and mount a partition to any other partition once you are using dynamic disks for the drives involved. I do this to avoid numerous drive letters and them changing when I add or remove hdd/zip drives through my slide chassis while you can assign letters in disk admin, you tend to have to use later letters like "k:" to keep from stepping on the toes of other drives. Also, if you reinstall Win2K onto the same partition even if you kill the old winnt directory you will still have the mounting point intact for the other volumes.

While the defragmenter that comes with Win2K works w/o drive letters, the full version (Diskeeper 5.0) will not. You can however assign a letter in addition to the volume mounting point name.