Dynamic volume to primary partition

[Tom Bradford]

I'm currently running Win XP Pro. on dynamic disks with the system partition mirrored.

I have a 20GB simple volume on one of the dynamic disks which I had intended to install a copy of Windows 7 Enterprise on, intending to dual-boot as I changed over from XP to 7, but it appears that you can't install Windows 7 on a dynamic disk as "setup cannot find a location for temporary files."

According to Microsoft my only option is to revert the existing dynamic disk/s to basic - losing everything on it including my XP installation.

Microsoft says not to mix volumes and partitions on the same disk, but a third party application called Dynamic Disk Converter claims to be able to change simple volumes back to primary partitions - though it isn't clear from the documentation if this can be done to just one volume out of several on a dynamic disk.

My options appear to be:

1. Get another hdd for Windows 7.
2. Break the XP mirror and convert one dynamic disk back to basic for Windows 7 - losing my RAID protection
3. Ignore Microsoft's advice and see if Dynamic Disk Converter actually can convert a simple volume back to a primary partition, risking my whole installation.

Any thoughts, advice?

 

[michaeljj]

hi, I have tested that software, and it works well, I convert my mirrored volume to basic without data loss, if there's no stripted volume, spanned volume and Raid 5 volume, the operation is safe. If you were worry about the risking, you could use the second mehtod of that software,to clone your existing volume to another basic disk. After the operation completed the volume will change to primary partition, then you could delete or break the source dynamic volume.