Dynamic Disk Support In HDM

Dynamic disks are a proprietary extension to MBR and GPT disk partitioning layouts. The technology is owned by Microsoft. It’s not sufficiently documented and can’t be properly supported by third party vendors like us.

Notice: Dynamic GPT is NOT supported at all!

Only the following Paragon products offer support for Microsoft Dynamic Disks:

• Hard Disk Manager Advanced – “Partition Manager” module
• Hard Disk Manager Professional
• Partition Manager Professional
• Drive Copy Professional

The support for MS Dynamic Disks is very limited. The following operations are possible:

• View Layout
• Format Volume
• Back up Volume
• Restore/Restore with Autoresize
• Convert to Basic MBR (ONLY simple volumes – NO spanned, striped, mirrored, etc.)
• Wipe/Clear Free Space
• Compact MFT
• Test Surface
• Check FS
• Edit/View Sectors

Currently it’s not possible to Copy/Migrate dynamic disks.

The Professional versions of our programs mentioned above can convert a Dynamic MBR Disk to a Basic MBR Disk. All data will be preserved and the volumes will be converted to partitions.

A Dynamic MBR Disk can be converted to a Basic MBR Disk with the Windows Disk Management (WDM, diskmgmt.msc) as well. For that purpose all volumes (partitions) on the disk have to be removed.

If you have a Dynamic MBR Disk by accident and do not know how to solve your issue please feel free to create a support request. If there is a way out of your trap we will find it for you. It would accelerate the process if you’d attach the following documentation:

• a screenshot of the Windows Disk Management tool: ‘Start’ resp. Windows logo => Run => diskmgmt.msc
• a screenshot from the “Disk View” of the Paragon Software
• the log files of the program as described in “How to Collect log files in products for Windows“

Backup & Recovery, Drive Copy, Hard Disk Manager™ for Windows, Know how: Paragon, Know how: Windows
Tags: backup, copy, issue, migration, windows

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