Recovery of a Dynamic Volume?

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Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 12:53:02 -0800

Initial caveat - I have been on the phone with MSFT XP tech support (India)
and they are absolutley clueless and useless. Probably one of the most
unsatisfying waste of time experiences in my whole computing career. Even
when i tried to escalate within their structure.

Windows XP SP2

I have (had) 2 SATA HDs in my system.
1st one was 120GB configured with 3 partitions and had OS and applications
on it. System boots from this drive.

2nd -300GB and configured as a dynamic volume with 3 partitions was for
storing documents, music and photos.

Last week as I was workiing I noticed that I had 3 seperate error messages
saying that there were was an error with the 'write ahead cache' on the drive
[x] which was located on the 2nd HD with the dynamic volume.

I closed all applications and had XP restart.

XP froze during load. I tried safe mode and system still froze during load.
I disconnected the 2nd HD and Windows Booted up just fine.

Reconnected 2nd HD.
I booted to an SP2 CD and went into recovery mode. XP was able to see both
HDs but the 2nd drive had corrupt file system and could only see one
partition out of the 3.

Booted to a DOS tools disk to run some hardware level diagnostics on the
drive. Everything came up clean.

Took drive out and installed it as a secondary drive on a different XP
machine.
XP booted up fine the 1st time.
Went into Drive Management. It saw the 2nd drive and a 'foreign' dynamic
volume. I imported the volume and restarted. XP froze during boot at the
exact same place as it did on the 1st machine. So we have effectively
eliminated any issues with hardware.

So there is obviously a serious XP bug here in that it cannot handle dealing
with a corrupt dynamic volume even when that volume does not host the
bootable image.
[Secondary issue being why were there write errors in the 1st place.]

What would you do if you didnt have knowledge to work with the disk in an
enviroment other than XP? They MSFT tech support people actually told me to
reformat BOTH drivesand then re-install. An absolutely ludicrous option.

Right now the only option i have is to boot to a partition magic floppy and
delete the dynamic volume and create new standard primary and extened
partitions.

UNLESS someone knows of any tools that i might be able to try for recovering
the dynamic volume. I have alot of data on the volume that I cannot replace.

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