A Modular Hard Drive Horror story

Question

Some months back, I came across an interesting issue while reinstalling XP on a 60 G HDD on an Inspiron 8200. All the data had been backed-up on a modular (secondary) HDD. So I deleted all partitions on C drive, formatted it, and installed XP on a single primary partition. After the OS reinstall, the Modular hard drive was not being detected in 'My Computer'. I found this very strange because prior to reinstalling the operating system the modular bay hard drive worked fine. The following partitions were present on C: before formatting : _: Partition 0 FAT 31 MB (29 MB free)C: Partition 1 NTFS 57192MB (35109 MB free)Unpartitioned Space 8MB *** NOTE -- The Modular hard drive was NOT physically present in the media bay at the time the primary was being partitioned and formatted. So, there's no way it could have got formatted by mistake  **** The Modular HDD was detected in BIOS. So I tried to access it from DOS. NO Go. Removed the primary, booted to a bootable disk and tried to access it from DOS -- No go. Checked with FDISK. The Modular HDD didn't have a drive letter assigned to it -- so no chance of accessing it. Finally, I checked in 'Disk Management'. It was showing up as : DISK 1: DYNAMIC FOREIGN with some kind of a yellow bang. The climax : Much later I was told that Volume Striping (RAID 0?) had been implemented on the drive. Given this, is there any way the data could have been recovered from the secondary? What exactly does the DYNAMIC FOREIGN status mean? I was unaware of the fact that RAID had been implemented while partitioning/formatting/reinstalling. Is there any indication in BIOS or the OS which would have warned me that the secondary HDD was actually dependent on the primary?

LittleAdvice · Answer

proboscis, Was the drive reinstalled in the system the same way that you installed the hard drive the first time?

proboscis_monke · Answer

I'm not really sure of this since I wasn't the end user. But, by the way, recently I came across an excellent site for disk management which describes basic and dynamic disks in detail :

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/prkb_cnc_vavr.asp

AlanKS · Answer

Dynamic disks are a new format introduced with Windows 2000, the foreign part is because the drive was not prepared in the system that you are viewing it with (as you have already stated). It may not work but Control Panel->Administrative tools->Computer Management->Storage->Disk Mangement will give you the option to 'Import Foreign Disk'.

Patrick March · Answer

I have been experiencing a similar problem with the secondary hard drive on a Latitude C800. (Details are listed in my 11-08-2003 Dell Forum post under Latitude: Hard Drive: Dynamic discs on Laptops: Reply.) If you, or any other forum members, have found a solution, please let me know.

Storage, Drives & Media

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