How do I recover files from dynamic-disk in Windows?

What are the Dynamic disks?

Dynamic disks are a central part of Windows storage management on the Server and XP Professional platforms, but the same features that make them so powerful and make them difficult for conventional disk image software and backups to handle.

Simply speaking, dynamic disks offer more management flexibility without the partition limitation of conventional (or "basic" in Microsoft-speak) storage. Dynamic disks can contain an unlimited number of volumes, but they cannot contain partitions or logical drives.

Volumes in dynamic disks can span several physical disks (spanned disks), or be striped across multiple disks for better performance (in striping, parts of the same file are physically located on multiple physical disk drives). Volumes in dynamic disks can also be mirrored or set up as a RAID 5 array. Dynamic volumes can even be confined to a single disk.

Since you can perform disk and volume operations on dynamic disks without restarting Windows, dynamic storage gives storage administrators a lot of options to deal with the rising flood of data. However, because dynamic disk volumes are usually virtual volumes rather than contiguous chunks of space on a single disk, they pose special problems for backup and especially for disk imaging software.

Dynamic storage is a good-news/bad-news proposition. While dynamic disks offer new powerful tools, they also have some serious limitations that aren't present with conventional disks. Many of these limits are related to backup and restoration.

Dynamic storage can scatter pieces of files across several disks, which means that many conventional disk imaging tools that read blocks off the disk sequentially won't capture a usable image.

The Data Recovery Wizard Professional supports five types of Dynamic volumes: Simple Volume, Striped Volume, Spanned Volume, Mirrored Volume, RAID 5 Volume.

To recover files from the dynamic disk volumes, follow these steps:

1. Click the "Complete Recovery" button on the main interface of Data Recovery Wizard Professional.

2. You can see the list of all basic disk partitions and dynamic disks volumes found on your computer.

3. Choose one of them and press the "NEXT" button (if you are familiar with file system details, you can change "Option" before pressing the "NEXT" button).

4. This step will launch the Intelligent Searching interface to search the file system which has been used in this volume.

5. You will see Select Recognized Partition Page which list found file systems in this volume.

6. Please select one or more partitions with the file systems which you are sure or unsure.

7. And then, the Data Recovery Wizard Professional will enter Building directories interface to find files.

8. After this scanning is finished, you'll see file/folder tree.

9. Select the file or directory that you want to recover and press the "NEXT" button.

10. Select a directory and press the "NEXT" button to save the data.

Notes: If the dynamic disks volumes have been lost, Data Recovery Wizard professional cannot recover the lost data except the Simple Volume.

The demo version of Data Recovery Wizard Professional gives you a much fairer idea about chances of data recovery from your hard disk before deciding upon the purchase. You can buy full version to recover data!

Caution: Saving file(s) to the partition or drive from where you are recovering data, for it may result in overwriting of data, and would result in permanent data loss!!

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