Dynamic disks
I'd like to kick Microsoft in the head. Over 90GB of data was lost on a drive due to the bugginess of the new "dynamic disk" partition method.
A new partitioning system is available in Windows. Instead of using a normal partition table (what is now called a "basic disk") uses a new partition system that is semi-integrated into the registry (called a "dynamic disk"). Normally I wouldn't bother trying out such a system, except I wanted to play around with software RAID on XP. Software RAID is possible in Win XP Pro after hacking some of the diskpart.exe and related code. I wanted to set up a mirrored boot partition (~7GB) between two physical drives.
After getting the settings changed, playing around with an add-on IDE controller card, removing that card, etc, I got the RAID working. It forced me to convert drives 1 and 2 both to be "dynamic disks". The end result was a working RAID (cool!), but I found it decreased system performance unacceptably, so I broke the RAID and removed the mirrored partition.
Fast forward about a month. I wanted to take some data along with me on a trip to visit my family, so I put my secondary HD into an external case. I was able to use the drive at the other destination, after using Disk Management to "import foreign disk". For some reason it didn't want to auto-mount the three partitions from the external "dynamic disk". I imported them and mounted them to an existing NTFS directory to make sharing on the LAN easier. Every time the disk was shut down and turned back on (~4x) Disk Management was need to "import foreign disk".
Upon returning home, I removed the drive from the external case and put it back into my server with all the same settings. No go. The drive showed up in Disk Manager, but I couldn't get it to mount the dynamic partitions.
After doing lots of searching, I found that the drive itself contained no volume information, so there was nothing there to mount. This is why Microsoft should be kicked in the head.
After a few hours of work, I was able to suck about 80GB of data off the drive by analyzing the raw sectors. A few more hours yielded the last bits. All in all, 92.8GB of data successfully recovered. Yay! I really didn't want to lose all that, as it would be difficult to reconstruct.
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