Messed up dynamic partition

My laptop has run into a problem. It is not booting into windows correctly for a very long time. It had windows in SSD which got corrupted and now the SSD is not showing up when I boot it into a PE type bootable enivironment. The windows were installed on SSD.


It has also has 1TB SATA disk which is a dynamic partition that shows up empty in that environment. I never made it a dynamic partition. It probably automatically got created way back in 2019 when I migrated the windows installation on it to a freshly installed SSD. After a long time and running into problems, I realized that dynamic partitions are a horrible options but it was too late and it would have taken me a long time to empty the data and convert into a regular partition. Also my laptop was running fine before I encountered the limitations of dynamic partitions.

Using a caddy, or external casing also doesn't allow me to access this hard drive on a normally functioning machine. I was using this disk for storing my documents, work, etc.

However, when I use a bootable USB drive with a windows installation for either Windows 10 or Windows 11, and I launch the installation setup, that dynamic partition shows up as filled and having 108 GB vacant space.

I booted it using Gandalf recovery environment.

Using diskpart gives me these results.


Using crystal disk info gave me this result.



To try again using a different environment, I used the official Microsoft Windows iso and tried using a windows to go usb, but I ran into this error.



How do i access my SATA drive? I want to take out data from it. Last month it was easily accessible using the PE environment. I even managed to take out a lot of urgent data from it.

Did you try FindandMount? Partition Find and Mount — free partition recovery software

What do you see in Disk Management?

Didn't check in disk management. Never heard of Findandmount. Will try it and post back soon!

For data recovery, I use a live Linux distro usb drive. (Mint Cinnamon or Ubuntu). It's interface is really easy to use. You might give that a try before you do anything that might mess with your partitions. Using one of these live distros, I copy and paste files onto another usb flash drive or external hard drive.

glasskuter said:

You might give that a try before you do anything that might mess with your partitions.

Click to expand...

FindandMount.exe does not.

From their site (and experience):

Mounting partitions​

After Scan finishes, you will see the full list of found partitions. Now, you can add any found partition to the system by mounting and assigning a letter to it.

All partitions are mounted in the read-only mode. You won't be able to alter files on such partitions, but only to copy files off that partition. This guarantees that the data cannot be altered by the operating system or any software (including malware).

Click to expand...

It does not repair the disk it only allows access while the application is running and the disk is mounted.

glasskuter said:

For data recovery, I use a live Linux distro usb drive. (Mint Cinnamon or Ubuntu). It's interface is really easy to use. You might give that a try before you do anything that might mess with your partitions. Using one of these live distros, I copy and paste files onto another usb flash drive or external hard drive.

Click to expand...

Okay I think two months back I was giving ubuntu a shot. I didn't recognize my disk drive after which I used windows PE environment to access the files.

Is Mint Cinnamon better than Ubuntu? Please share the link of the most suitable version for these types of tasks. I'm almost zero in using Linux.

I am downloading the iso titled 'Linuxmint-21.2-cinnamon-64bit.iso' from here.

archz2 said:

Is Mint Cinnamon better than Ubuntu?

Click to expand...

They're both good with little learning curve. You can see screenshots in the "about" section of the site. I use either depending on which flash drive I find first. Keep in mind, depending on the state of your disk, Linux might not see it/be able to access it either but it's worth a shot.

For either version of Linux creating the usb and accessing the live desktop without installing it is the same..

Okay. So I booted from Linux mint and went to the disks section.

It is not detecting my partition properly. Here's what I see.






What do I do now?

To answer your question, from Linux desktop click computer icon. Any recognizable disks should show up there. (One of which would be the flash drive you are running Linux off of)

That said, I discovered using Linux won't work for you. I've only ever used Linux for file recovery and never from a dynamic disk. Since my previous post, I found a Linux wiki that said the libldm package must be installed into Linux before it can mount a dynamic disk. Therefore running from the live usb drive won't work in your case since you are unable to install packages into it.

There are definitely ways to convert a dynamic disk using Windows tools but they all result in data loss. The only way I know to convert a dynamic disk to basic without data loss would be to install the drive in another computer and use a third party tool that is capable of handling it. (Easeus Partition Master, Aoemi Partition Assistant, Minitool Partition Wizard) However, none of the free versions of these tools can do it so it requires buying the software.

Sorry, I don't have better news for you. Do any of you super-duper command line folks know of anything that would work for this poster?

Please run the Sea Tools bootable long generic test: