Windows Dynamic Disks: Just Say No
OK, Chester, Just Say No next time.
I've been doing a little Googlism on the subject, and the information I've found seems to form a locus around the "it's crap" point.
Firstly, let's remind ourselves of what a Dynamic Disk actually is.
The short version is that it's a Windows proprietary disk format that does away with the partition table. The upside of this is that you can resize dynamic volumes, you can have as many as you like on a disk, do cheap'n'cheerful software RAID, and so on and so forth. The downside is that there's no partition table, so conventional recovery utilities that don't speak Dynamic Disk are stymied. Windows XP Home can't deal with Dynamic Disks, so systems running this OS are no good for recovery purposes. Whatever your Windows version, Dynamic Disks aren't supported on laptops.
One of the recurring themes in my Googlism is that when they break, they break hard. Transplanting the disk to another Windows computer and attempting to import the (now 'foreign') disk rarely works. You can convert it to a basic disk, but this will either lose all the data or save it all: do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?
Linux might work if you get a copy of the latest Knoppix; it allegedly can mount the volumes, allowing you to copy the data elsewhere.
Any attempt to fiddle with the partition table will result in data loss, because there isn't one.
