Foreign disk dynamic disk drive?!

[Nuker43]

Hey...

So on my second pc i have 2 IDE hard drives and for no reason my 250 gb hard drive which had a ton of data on it decides not to show up under my computer anymore.

I poped the drive out and put it in another puter and same thing happens... windows installs the drive but it doens't show up.

I loaded up knoppix and knoppix detects the drive while its booting but it doesn't show up to mount in the shell itself.

When i go to disk management, i see the drive but it says "Foreign." What do i do and how can i get this drive working agian with out losing data?

Also, i made no changes to the operating system at all, it just poofed one day for no reason.
Thanks

 

[Nuker43]

really need help here...

 

[Jiggz]

In Disk management where it shows as foreign or dynamic drive, right click on it and change it to basic drive.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

If you switch it back to basic, I believe Windows will destroy the drive (just the contents/partitions). That's how it was with Windows 2000.

Another option would be to use data recovery software like GetDataBack. If you have the disk space to backup the data on the foreign disk that could be an option.

What about any of the partition magic, etc. software. They may have a function to revert the drive back to a "basic" disk.

 

[ghidu]

I'm guessing you'll have to import it. I don't remember the exact term, but just right click on the "foreign" disk and look for an option like that.
Dynamic disk has nothing to do with it not showing up in explorer.

 

[shrumpage]

I have the exact same issue, except it is a 300gb maxtor, sata.

Some friends have been working on a movie - and all of a sudden their drive is not working. Shows the disk, but not the volume. The disk is NTFS and dynamic. They bring the disk to me, i pop it in another computer. The drive shows up in post, and under Hardware Manger it is identified correctly. Shows up as a foreign disk, but can't import it. In the even viewer it gives "INTERNAL Error - The disk group contains no valid configuration copies (C10000B6)"

Have download a tool from stellarinfo.com. It lets me see the files on the drive, but i need to buy it before I can pull any files off.

Does anyone have any ideas or recommendations? They would be greatly appericated.

 

[MysticLlama]

ghidu is right.

I had this issue with a couple of portable drives I accidentally made dynamic.

In Disk management, right click ont the foreign dynamic disk, and click import disk.

That will pull the info it needs from the drive and you'll be able to access it again, if of course it's not a hardware problem.

 

[lansalot]

It may help if you think of Dynamic Disks not as disks, but as 'smart devices'. You can eject a dynamic disk (which of course also means the volumes on it) and import them all to another machine.

This really helps when using winxp/2k/2k3 built-in volume management such a striping and mirroring - you can create a striped or mirrored set on one machine and import them to another just by plugging the disks in and then importing.

A useful piece of information about dynamic disks is that they contain information not only about themselves, but also of others in the same configuration, ie "i am one of a two-disk stripe - and he is the other one".