NTFS Mounting/Dynamic Disks

I have three drives (one PATA, two SATA) which each have single primary NTFS partitions on them. I cannot boot from any of these because the XP installation on the system drive is corrupt. When I boot using a DSL live CD, I can mount two of them (one PATA, one SATA) but not the third (although I suspect that may be some limitation of the distro). When I boot using Vista from a fourth drive, I can mount one of the SATA drives, but the others appear as "Raw" (unformatted).
If I try to repair the XP installation by booting from the CD, all three drives appear as unformatted.

Could this have anything to do with them being configured as dynamic volumes while under XP?
Or does anyone have any other thoughts on why I might not be able to mount them all properly?


— P

Sup PG...I've never used dynamic volumes, so I don't know if that is your problem. I would say your best bet is to pull the data off each drive, but do this 1 drive at a time. Unplug all the drives except the 1st one you need to get data off of, boot up (with your DSL live CD or Vista drive), backup the data you need, then shutdown and do the same thing for each of the other drives. Once you've backed them all up, do a clean format and start over. Chances are that if you don't format these drives and somehow get them working again...your corruption will more than likely return.

Actually, I should have mentioned that I have been hooking the drives up one at a time. Two of them just aren't recognised at all under my Vista installation.


I've got a new set of drives that I'm going to use in a RAID 10 array and if I can mount the old drives under Linux I'll copy my data on to the new array. I'm puzzled about why I can't mount them in Vista though and why the XP installer can't recognise the format. I had XP installed for a very long time, so it may be that I did in fact convert them to dynamic at some point without remembering. I don't see why this would break anything though.

You may have a recourse on fixing the xp install if you can tell me what the symptom is upon booting.

Dynamic volumes are exactly your problem here. You may be able to convert them to a standard volume after you've booted. Check the partition program drvmgmt.msc and see if it can do this. If you have them dynamic to bypass the drive size limit, then you may be in trouble.

You could do an "upgrade" install of xp from a running OS and overwrite the corrupted install, but i doubt vista will let you run the install program.
What it boils down to is this failsafe method:
1. Run scandisk on all drives you can get to be recognized (especially the system drive)
2. if it can be converted to a simple volume, then do so. If not, then you will have to reformat it after copying needed data.
3. run the xp install disk from dos.

note you shouldn't have to mess with the other drives. xp will recognize them just fine after install.

Driver-related BSOD during XP boot.

I can't remember whether I tried bypassing the bad driver. I think I did and it crashed anyway. I can try it again though.

I'm not aware of any size limit on simple volumes. Is there one?
The drives are 80GB PATA, 160GB SATA, and 320GB SATA. I could only get the 160GB to be recognised under Vista.

there's a size limit, but it's something like 750gig. It's been addressed i believe. Did it specify what driver was bad? Like the video card or sound or some such? You might be able to disable the particular device in the bios before booting windows. this will prevent the driver from loading. then afterwards you can do a system rollback to remove the faulty driver install. If not, you can try booting into safe mode and then see how that works out for you. I personally had to do this exact thing when i installed the wrong chipset sound driver. There are numerous ac97 drivers and the wrong one will give BSOD.