Microsoft and its dumb dynamic disk

June 17, 2007 Andy

Booted up my system yesterday only to realize that my 200GB SATA drive could not be mounted (or rather offline in MS lingo).

The drive was a dynamic drive. Dynamic drive spells out many pros, one of it is that you could create software raid if you have another similar volume. For no apparent reasons, the dynamic disk suddenly went offline and couldn’t be made online anymore.

First thing I tried was to use some data recovery softwares. The demo softwares couldn’t read all the files. Then the next time came into my mind. Should I still use a win32 software to recover files due to a Microsoft mistake?

I wonder why the Microsoft Operating System refuse to mount the volume while Linux has not problem mounting the NTFS volume. Microsoft rejecting their own creation (NTFS)?

Next thing I did was to mount the NTFS volume in linux. Viola, all the files are accessible. Now copying the files over to my Network Attached Storage (D-Link DNS-323). Cross fingers and pray that everything will go well. Time to create a MD5 hash for the copied files. Hope the gigabit link is not flawed.

Update on 19th June 2007, 0900hrs

Microsoft couldn’t repartition the disk nor can it format the disk. In the end I need to use parted to repartition the disk. Now doing diagnostic test on the harddisk. Twenty-two hours to go.

Update on 19th June 2007, 2130hrs

The windows diagnostic test is taking too long. Broke out of the test and did the test in Caldera. It completed under one hour. After much investigation. The features of windows turned forced the harddisk to go into PIO mode after those initial accessing errors due to the dynamic-disk-being-offline-issue which reduced the downloading speed to 10+ mbps (from my DNS-323 to the affected disk). After clearing the necessary registry entries (that kept the drive in PIO mode no matter how hard I try), it is now running in UDMA Mode 5. Downloading at 140+ mbps (from my NAS).

Moral of the story

Never use a windows method to solve a Microsoft mistake. It only makes the problem worst. Look into another alternatives. In my case, using linux to access the data on NTFS volume, using parted (in linux) to repartition the drive which Microsoft failed to do so, using Caldera to run diagnostic softwares to check the harddisk for errors which windows take an awefully long time to do (23 hours).