Dynamic disks are the hard drive configurations that provide advanced functionalities like disk mirroring, parity and striping etc. One can easily apply dynamic disk configurations on any hard drive type like IDE and SATA hard drives. Actually these dynamic disks are very flexible to use. On these dynamic disks one can create various types of volumes like Spanned Volumes, Mirrored Volumes, Stripped Volumes, RAID 5 volumes and many more.
In spite of these advantages, dynamic disks do have some limitations. Windows allows you to install operating system only on basic disk i.e. a primary disk. Moreover, most of the dynamic disk users have encountered dynamic disk invalid errors and many such errors while using these dynamic disks. Hence due to these reasons, you might want to convert dynamic disk to basic disk. But what is the best way to convert dynamic disk to basic disk? Below are the steps that help you in performing this conversion in an effective manner:
Caution: Take complete back up of all the data in the Volumes and store it on any external drive safely.
- First go to "Start" button, click on it and then "Control Panel", this will open up the control panel
- Now, in the list of options provided on the control panel just double-click on "Administrative Tools" icon, and then double-click "Computer Management", with this a Computer Management Console will be opened
- In this Computer Management window, just click on "Disk Management" option that is located in the leftmost pane of the console
- Select all the volumes that are included in the dynamic and you wish to covert, and then right click on them
- You will now get a context menu with a list of some options among them select "Delete" option
- Once all the volumes are deleted just right click on the disk and select "Convert to basic disk" option.
With this the disk will now be converted into basic and will be set up for normal usage. One important point, while selecting the volumes for deletion, be careful and make sure all your data from all the volumes is backed up. If not, with just one simple click your entire data will be lost! Since you are deleting the Volumes, if you select a wrong volume then all your data within that volume will be lost. Don’t worry, in such cases you can use the Remo Recover software which is the best Windows data recovery software in order to easily restore the deleted volume with all its data intact in just a matter of minutes. Nevertheless, it is recommended to have backup of all the volumes.
