Dynamic Hard Disks.
For the last year, my life has been fueled by little else than music and film. All this music and film, that of it which hasnt been culled after consumption or is yet to be consumed, has been stored on a Samsung 400GB HDD.
Now i dun know a lot about computers, so somehow, i ended up configuring this disk, upon installing it in my desktop, as a 'Dynamic' disk.
One year of satisfactory usage ensued.
Now im off to do more exciting crap. But i still wanted to take all my stuff with me. So i bought a 3"5 inch external HDD case, intending on using my 400GB Samsung with my crappy old IBM T21 laptop while overseas.
But, upon plugging the HDD into my laptop, i discovered i wasnt able to access it, as it supposedly wasnt supported, being 'dynamic'. The only option offered was "Convert to Basic Disk", which involved a full format and loss of data.
I tried everything, installed XP Pro, formatted the laptop, tried other pc's, yet eventually it seemed the only way, would be to remove the 360GB of data off the drive to another drive and convert the Samsung from 'dynamic' to 'basic'. Plenty of people had 400GB HDD's but rarely with 360GB free, not to mention the five hours it would likely take to transfer all the data back and forth. In the end i gave it to Ogre, n he found it would run on two of his XP Pro machines, both desktops, but not on Onyx's XP Pro laptop. It was guessed that XP Service Pack 3 would likely fix the problem.
It didnt.
So i got back to Google n dug even deeper, until i stumbled upon a possible answer on a Registry Hacking forum.
It seems that XP Pro supports 'dynamic' drives, but only if XP pro is installed on a Desktop. XP installed on a laptop will not support it. Very, very carefully i followed instructions allowing me to change startup numerical values in my laptops registry. I then rebooted and to my untold relief, was given the option of 'Importing Foreign Dynamic Drive' and can now access everything.
Now i dun know a lot about computers, so somehow, i ended up configuring this disk, upon installing it in my desktop, as a 'Dynamic' disk.
One year of satisfactory usage ensued.
Now im off to do more exciting crap. But i still wanted to take all my stuff with me. So i bought a 3"5 inch external HDD case, intending on using my 400GB Samsung with my crappy old IBM T21 laptop while overseas.
But, upon plugging the HDD into my laptop, i discovered i wasnt able to access it, as it supposedly wasnt supported, being 'dynamic'. The only option offered was "Convert to Basic Disk", which involved a full format and loss of data.
I tried everything, installed XP Pro, formatted the laptop, tried other pc's, yet eventually it seemed the only way, would be to remove the 360GB of data off the drive to another drive and convert the Samsung from 'dynamic' to 'basic'. Plenty of people had 400GB HDD's but rarely with 360GB free, not to mention the five hours it would likely take to transfer all the data back and forth. In the end i gave it to Ogre, n he found it would run on two of his XP Pro machines, both desktops, but not on Onyx's XP Pro laptop. It was guessed that XP Service Pack 3 would likely fix the problem.
It didnt.
So i got back to Google n dug even deeper, until i stumbled upon a possible answer on a Registry Hacking forum.
It seems that XP Pro supports 'dynamic' drives, but only if XP pro is installed on a Desktop. XP installed on a laptop will not support it. Very, very carefully i followed instructions allowing me to change startup numerical values in my laptops registry. I then rebooted and to my untold relief, was given the option of 'Importing Foreign Dynamic Drive' and can now access everything.