Symantec 10024709 Dynamic disks in Windows 2000/XP, See Reinitializing the Master Boot Record on

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Dynamic disks in Windows 2000/XP

Dynamic disks in Windows 2000/XP

Norton Ghost supports backing up, restoring, and cloning simple or mirrored volumes on dynamic disks. Spanned, striped, and RAID-5 volumes are not supported by Norton Ghost. You can back up an image of a partition on a disk in a dynamic disk set to an image file. If you back up a disk, then all of the partitions that Ghost supports on the disk, and only those partitions, are backed up to an image file.

Note: Norton Ghost supports simple volumes in a contiguous space. If a partition is not of this type, then it is not included in the image file.

Operations that support dynamic disks are as follows:

■Partition to partition

■Partition to image

■Disk to disk

■Disk to image

■Check image

■Check disk

■CRC32

■CRC32 verify

You can restore an image of a dynamic disk only to a basic disk, not to a dynamic disk. After you have restored the image file to a basic disk, you can then use Windows 2000 Disk Manager to convert the disk to a dynamic disk.

To delete a dynamic disk, use GDisk. Use the switch gdisk /mbr /wipe to delete all partitions from the disk. This method destroys all data on the disk.

See “Reinitializing the Master Boot Record” on page 132.

You can also take a disk image of a dynamic disk if you use the image all (-ia) switch. The -ia switch performs a sector-by-sector copy of the entire disk. The disk on which the image is to be restored must be identical to the source disk in every way. This function is only useful for creating a backup. If you restore an image created using -ia onto a drive with different geometry, Windows 2000 cannot interpret the dynamic disk.