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I'm trying to convert a disk from basic to dynamic to mirror two volumes on another disk of equal size. I have used the disk before, but it is currently wiped clean, not even partitioned.

In disk management I see "465.32 GB - Unallocated" and "450 MB - Healthy (Recovery Partition)" on the disk.

When I try to convert it into a dynamic disk I get an error saying there isn't enough space on the disk.

Where do I even start to troubleshoot this? I'm on Windows 10 and I have used this particular disk for this very purpose before.

Christian Lundahl
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2 Answers2

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You get this problem when you have a large unallocated space. Create a dummy volume in this space, and then you will be able to convert the disk to dynamic. You can then delete the dummy volume if you want.

Bruce
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To perform a successfull conversion you have to do the things this way:

  1. Shrink the size of Recovery partition on the 2nd drive, to get some free space in the very end of the disk - this is necessary to make the conversion to Dynamic possible, otherwise you haver the "no space left" error
  2. Create RAW dummy volume on the unallocated space between EFI partition and Recovery partition, this is also necessary to avoid the same error
  3. Now you can perform a successfull conversion the 2nd disk to Dynamic

I successfully did all of these when needed to mirror bootable Windows 10 OS installed on NVMe with UEFI/GPT. Rescuezilla and it's tools helps a lot to make the full process complete:

  • boot Rescuezilla, and close the main Rescue application, so you can get to desktop,
  • start GParted and create new 100MB ESP (fat32 with esp and boot flags) partition in the very beggining of the 2nd disk
  • using GParted create a 668MB Recovery (ntfs with hidden and diag flags) partition in the very end of 2nd disk,
  • start Rescuezilla again from the desktop icon and clone ESP and Recovery partitions only (uncheck overwriting GPT, select source -> target partiotions individually inside the selection window)
  • start Gparted again and shrink Recovery a bit (3MB is enough), so you can get free unallocated space near the very end of the disk
  • boot to Windows, start Windows Disk Management and create dummy RAW partition in unallocated space between ESP and Recovery partitions
  • convert the the 1st (if it's not already converted) and the 2nd disk to Dynamic
  • right-click on your main OS NTFS partition and select mirroring to 2nd disk (it's called Disk 1, since the main disk is called Disk 0),
  • wait until mirroring is completed
Dave M
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HUANAN POLSKA
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