Hello,

I usually consider myself to be fairly computer savvy, but earlier today I think I screwed up pretty bad.

I recently acquired a laptop HDD for free that my friend no longer wanted/needed. When I got it, I slapped it in my HP Pavilion dv8000t laptop computer's second hard disk space, overjoyed that I had now effectively doubled my storage space! How exciting, right? Well, all was well and good, I had my new drive partitioned and working fine in my computer, until I started looking around at the possibility of running a dynamic disk on my laptop. I was skeptical at first, but when I read a few articles online about it, none of them said it COULDN'T be done, only that it wasn't really that useful (on a laptop). And of course, my laptop was one of the ones which still allowed for the dynamic disk conversion even though it wasn't supported by the OS. Blinded by curiosity, and not realizing the gravity of the situation, I made a poor decision and converted both disks to dynamic. My problem now is obvious. Neither hard drive is recognized by the laptop, I cannot even use the Windows XP install disc to attempt to rectify the situation. My only hope of recovering the files I had on my primary drive is a registry hack that I discovered while browsing another forum, which has supposedly been tried by a couple people and has worked for them, allowing usage of dynamic disks on their laptop by "tricking" the OS into thinking it's running on a desktop. Who knows if that would have worked for me anyway.

Soooo...Any suggestions? I know I'm in over my head

Dynamic disks are not supported under XP Home. You don't state whether you're using XP Home or not but as its branded computer it's most likely that you are. So converting them wasn't a very good idea was it?

Something that usually works (though I've only tried this on secondary drives but I see no reason why it shouldn't work on a primary drive) is to clone the dynamic drive to another drive. Then for reasons I've never been able to quite understand, it morphs back into a basic disk that XP Home can read. You can then clone it back to the original drive and it will retain its Basic Disk structure.

I'm actually running XP Pro on my laptop, or was, until this fiasco. However, I've got a few potential solutions that I'm working on at the moment, so I'll keep you posted as to whether or not I succeed in cleaning up my mess. Thanks for the response though!

Well, that was FAR easier than I could have expected.

You should all do yourselves a favor and get your hands on a copy of Partition Table Doctor, even if you don't need it. Within 15 minutes I had my lappy up and running again with all my data like nothing had happened. 12 of those 15 minutes were spent discovering the program, and the rest were spent downloading it, installing it, and using it to recover my partition table information. All I had to do was plug my primary hard disk from the laptop into my dad's desktop via a SATA/USB adapter and let the program work it's near-instantaneous magic on my hard disk.

HIGHLY reccommended.

Oh, and yes, I did learn my lesson. =P