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Here is my scenario; Windows 2008 server on a VM. Two VM disks;
Disk1> OS (Basic )
Disk2> Data and an Installed Application. (Basic)

During the weekend, I was playing with this VM, I wanted to add some space to the Disk2. I created a new disk (disk3), converted it to a Dynamic volume and added this to disk 2 (disk 2 also converted to Dynamic volume) and for some reason these now are spanned volumes.

Disk1> OS (Basic )
Disk2> Data and an Installed Application. (Dynamic) (part of span with D3)
Disk3> Data and an Installed Application. (Dynamic) (part of span with D2)

Just like an IDIOT, I haven't taken any snapshot of this before I've made the changes.

My question, is there a way I can re-convert this again to Basic?

I don't want to delete and recreate the disk volumes because of the application installed on the disk 2.

Hennes
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Mouradb
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2 Answers2

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Since you still have all your data on the span with disk 2 and 3, you can:

  1. Create a new BASIC disk (disk4)
  2. Copy all data from the span to the basic disk 4.
  3. Shutdown the VM
  4. Remove disks 2 and 3.
  5. Remove disk 4 (remove from VM, remove, not delete!)
  6. Add the disk file back as disk 2

How to do this precisely depends on your software. VMware? Qemu, virtual PC, ... ...

And as always, make a backup before you do this. Better safe than sorry.

An alternative is to copy the VM.

  • Create a new VM with two basic disks.
  • Copy the disk file for from the working install (OS disk only!)
  • Use the network to copy files from the other VM to this one.

Effectively you do the same, but you keep the old VM around rather than making a backup.
If you do this you might want to double check how your VM software allocates MAC addresses and you might get a duplicate name on network problem. (The latter is a guess. I know Xp and win7 will throw that, but I never needed to do this with server 2008).

Hennes
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As an alternative you may be able to use the method described here How to non-destructively convert dynamic disks to basic disks

This method uses a free utility called TestDisk, which I have used several times with great success. However, I have never tried using this with spanned volumes.

It's also worth taking a look at the utilities here http://www.partitionwizard.com/ there are several to choose from including a boot disk, which is free and allows coversion of Dynamic to basic disks.

As always, if you have any data you need to keep, make sure you take a copy first. You may not need it but...

Pulse
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