Monday, October 4, 2010

Convert Windows 2003 From Dynamic Disk Back to Standard Disk

CAUTION:  ONLY DO THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T EXTENDED YOUR DISK YET.  DO AT YOUR OWN RISK, YOU MAY LOSE YOUR ENTIRE DRIVE.  DON'T TRY ON ENCRYPTED DISKS.

I did this so that I could resize a partition using GParted after resizing a VirtualBox disk manually.

If you're not using VirtualBox, skip this part:

  1. Firstly create a new vdi, under ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks
  2. #VBoxManage createhd -filename new.vdi --size 10000 --remember
  3. #VBoxManage clonehd old.vdi new.vdi --existing


First, try following Microsoft's Instructions here and immediatley scroll to WORKAROUND section.  Service Pack 2 Tools for 2003 can be found here. The tool may behave a little differently than the article suggests.  If so, try this:
  1. Run "dskprobe.exe"
  2. Click the "+" next to physical volumes
  3. Right click physical drive 0, Click "Open Handle"
  4. Right click physical drive 0, Click "Read Sectors".
    Starting sector: 0
    Number of sectors:  48
  5. Click READ
  6. In the editor, find the 01C0 line. In this line, the third pair of numbers on the right is 42. Change 42 to 07.  (Zero, Seven)
    Note On some computers, 42 may appear on the 01D0 line.
  7. Right click physical drive 0, Click "Write Sectors"
    Starting sector: 0
    Number of sectors:  48
  8. Close dskprobe.exe
  9. Optionally, you can now use an Ubuntu Live CD to resize your NTFS partition.

Gparted tells me it can't resize windows dynamic disks

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