Recovery of lost data due to the moving of dynamic disks between computers

As we know that dynamic volumes extend physical storage beyond one physical hard disk drive. When a basic hard disk is being initialized to contain dynamic volumes, enabling us to carry out volume and disk management without even restarting the Windows, we name it a dynamic disk. Suppose, you are using a dynamic disk with a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) partition table and that contains partitions, using other spanned, mirrored, stripped or RAID-5 volume based disks. Here, if the disks based on non GUID based partition are moved in between computers, they get reconfigured and an instance of data loss occurs. In such situations, the safest and the most possible option to recover the lost data is a third-party partition recovery software.

A brief about Dynamic disks:

Basically, a dynamic disk comprises of dynamic volumes including spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes, simple volumes and RAID-5 volumes across multiple hard disk drives. Dynamic volumes are in a sense fault tolerant and is used for huge storage of data safely with low cost. The main concern is that the non GUID partition structure based disks under a dynamic volume get reconfigured when they are attached to some other system and you tend to loose data from that particular disk.

Note: The GUID is the standard layout of the partition table on a hard disk and keeps the information about the basic/dynamic disks and volumes associated with it.

Cause:

The above data loss instance may occur due to the fact that the Logical Disk Manager keeps only one ID for the dynamic disk group on a particular computer. After being reconfigured by other computer, when the non GUID disk is moved back to the source computer, the computer sees two different dynamic disk ID. One of the ID matches with that of the source computer and the other doesn't as it is being modified by the other computer. Hence, the source computer changes the property of the incoming disk as its own and data from the reconfigured incoming disk gets lost.

Resolution:

You can resolve the issue by installing the latest service pack for Microsoft Windows 2000. However, the data that has already been lost can not be recovered through the service pack and you need to use any Windows partition recovery softwareto get back that lost data.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is a trusted partition recovery utility that can recover the lost, deleted or partitioned data from all the Windows based volumes, such as exFAT, FAT, and NTFS.