Windows 10 not recognizing entirety of dynamic disk

[millej]

I apologize for the wall of text in advance.

I turned on my desktop mid-afternoon on the 22nd and Windows decided to do the anniversary update. The update caused my graphics card to stop working and I ended up speaking to Nvidia tech support. They weren't able to make any progress and recommended checking Windows update again to see if it would help. Unfortunately, the second Windows update left me with a machine that wouldn't boot past a black loading screen after the Windows logo. At this point, I got MS tech support involved and none of their suggestions worked, and they eventually recommended I wipe the Windows install and start fresh.

Not wanting to lose anything, I used the command prompt on the Windows install media to copy files from my 250 GB SSD to my 1 TB HDD(dynamic drive, simple partitions of 146.48 GB and 785.03 GB). I eventually got sick of the command line transfer and ended up setting up and using a Linux Mint liveUSB to be able to visually check progress instead of constantly typing commands to check. This, I believe, was the cause of my major downfall. Once in Linux, I tried to mount the TB drive, and it wouldn't work. I did some research and used ntfsfix to get it to mount for me. After a little further fiddling with the SSD, I was able to see both and was able to copy files over to the HDD.

At this point, I decided I had done enough and was confident I wasn't going to lose anything important, and went back into the Windows install media to check things, saw the command prompt didn't seem to be reading free space on the HDD correctly, but didn't think much of it. As a last test before wiping, I tried pulling my video card with the machine off and booting it up. Shockingly, the machine booted up into Windows just fine. Unfortunately, Windows was seeing the HDD as only having a capacity of 785 gigs. I freaked out a bit because that certainly wasn't as it should be, did some looking around, and couldn't fix anything.

At this point, I contacted MS tech support and began to confuse the poor rep that I was connected to. He didn't have many suggestions beyond chkdsk and disk cleanup, but confirmed that bootrec.exe /fixmbr and its other commands could probably help. I believe that this is the second major mistake in all of this. This, unfortunately, did not fix my problem. Knowing that I had been using linux and was able to see the entire drive there, he suggested I use that, back it all up wherever I could, and then reformat the drive. I disconnected and went about his suggestion. Unfortunately, Linux was now seeing the same 785 gig drive that Windows was.

That is where I'm stuck at this point. Currently, Windows Explorer and any similar program sees the drive like this. Disk Management is seeing both simple partitions as healthy, but only the 785 gig partition is viewable by Windows. After some research, my best guess is that the LDM is busted, but I have no idea if that's actually the case, and I'm not seeing anything online to help if it is the case.

Is there anything I can do to repair this dynamic disk so I can avoid losing whatever has been put on that part of the drive? Thanks in advance.

 

[Colif]

The two partitions on 2nd hard drive both have same drive letter, that is pretty tricky...

have you tried changing the drive letter of the 150gb partition? I wonder if it would want to change F as well.

Has this drive always just been storage?

its odd that disk 0 is your storage drive, C drive should be on drive 0

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/291224-32-disk-management-shows-partitions-drive-letter

not sure if this applies

No. You still have one E: volume. It's just in two pieces on the disc.

Psycogeek is wrong. The text description does match the graphics. Xe has not paid enough attention to what is clearly written there. Even though Disk Manager has told you in that screenshot no fewer than five times that this is a dynamic, not a basic, disc, you've both still overlooked this. Moreover, Disk Manager is clearly saying that the text list is a list of volumes, not of the underlying disc slices. You have one E: volume, and it is listed once.

You extended a simple volume into another slice of the disc, so now Disk Manager is diagrammatically showing you the two slices of the disc that, when concatenated, make up the whole of the single volume. Some simple arithmetic confirms that, indeed, 128 is 30 plus 98.

And because of the way that you've done this, the slices are in reverse order. The first (30GiB) piece on the disc is actually the second part of the actual volume.

http://superuser.com/questions/346555/two-drives-with-the-same-drive-letter

 

[Colif]

seems drive order doesn't matter too much

This is a great article by Microsoft and the explanation behind it is: "Microsoft has confirmed that this problem is due to design limitations in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section. This problem occurs because drives are enumerated in the order in which they are presented to the operation system by the system BIOS." And so it earlier explains: "The disk-assignment numbers may not necessarily match the corresponding SATA or RAID channel numbers. There is no assurance of a consistent relationship between PnP enumeration and the order of the hard disks that are detected during setup. Devices are presented in the order in which they are enumerated. Therefore, the disk-assignment numbers may change between startups. For example, assume that you run Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, or Windows 7 Setup on a computer that has two unformatted SATA or RAID hard disks. In this situation, Windows may present the second hard disk as Disk 0 when you are prompted for the disk on which to install Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, or Windows 7."

Technically speaking, I'm not sure about "if hard drive containing windows is not the first option in BIOS then simply you will not be able to boot windows."

If you go to the Boot Order in the BIOS and say you E drive is listed first and it doesn't have an OS on it; your CD/DVD player is listed next and there is not OS install disk in the player; your USB input is listed third; and your C: drive with the OS is listed 4th, the BIOS will just skip over the first three and boot from your C: drive no issue.

http://www.makeuseof.com/answers/why-is-my-c-drive-on-disk1-and-e-on-disk0-and-is-that-bad/

 

[millej]

The two partitions on 2nd hard drive both have same drive letter, that is pretty tricky...

have you tried changing the drive letter of the 150gb partition? I wonder if it would want to change F as well.

Has this drive always just been storage?

its odd that disk 0 is your storage drive, C drive should be on drive 0

I have tried changing the drive letter on one partition and the other followed suit.

The quote you gave is exactly what's going on. A while back, I only have this 1 TB drive and used the small partition for my Windows install and the large partition for storage. Once I had another drive for my primary, I believe I used disk management to extend the large partition over the small one, but it said it couldn't do that for whatever reason, but it could combine the two as a dynamic disk, so I went for it.

Prior to this all going sideways on me, I'd been running this computer like this for roughly six hours short of a year, so I'd agree with the drive order not mattering.

I read through this link(http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/291224-32-disk-management-shows-partitions-drive-letter) and that similar to what I've got going on, but that user could still access all the data across the simple partitions that made up his dynamic disk. You'll not that his/her A: partition sizes add up to the total shown above for the A: drive, where as mine do not. I've tried some of the solutions offered, but the merging isn't an option because partition master can't merge dynamic partitions, and I can't see the data on the drive to copy it off at the moment. What's fun is that I can tell, for the most part, which files are on the inaccessible area because they're reporting as having a zero file size. If I can make it fit in the budget, I'm considering going to pick up a 2 or 3 TB drive tomorrow and attempting to use the "Copy Dynamic Volume" capabilities of Partition Master to bring the data to the new drive, but I have no idea if it'll be able to see through the cut off or not.

 

[Colif]

you can't merge drives that have data on them, and even if you did delete that 150gb, you cannot merge into onto a drive that is behind the blank space. IT has to be [Drive you merging to] [blank space] not the other way around.

I think it could be the fact that first half of drive used to be windows that is also throwing it out as well.

I would buy a 2tb drive, split it into 2 1tb partitons, copy everything off the 785gb onto one of them and then use the other for the partition magic operation, so you have some backed up if it doesn't work. Do you have any clue whats on the other partition?

or does partition master need unallocated space to write to?

I haven't seen this happen before

Your problem and my problem almost the same: I can see drives in disk management, but non of the partitions were executable, in my windows explorer the drive letters were gone. in my case, disk-part shows everything correctly, and the following method resolved my issue.

Please remove the problematic physical hard drive, attached to another running machine, and run chkdsk with /f /x /c /r, or only /r and /f. Then re-attach, also update your hard disk driver.

Thankyou

http://serverfault.com/questions/517696/is-there-any-way-to-fix-a-corrupted-ldm-database

 

[Colif]

I asked for help somewhere and their request was

Post the output of `sudo parted -l` from a linux system?

I don't know what it is but they are a moderator here so I trust them.

 

[millej]

I asked for help somewhere and their request was

Post the output of `sudo parted -l` from a linux system?

I don't know what it is but they are a moderator here so I trust them.

The suggested command gave me the following:

Model: ATA SAMSUNG HD103SJ (scsi)

Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB

Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B

Partition Table: msdos

Disk Flags:



Number Start End Size Type File system Flags

1 32.3kB 1000GB 1000GB primary

The formatting is a little screwy, so here's a screenshot of it.

Thanks for your help and persistence. I really appreciate it.