How do I recover files from dynamic disk in Windows?

What are the dynamic disks?

Dynamic disks are a central part of Windows storage management on the Server and XP Professional platforms, but the same features make them so powerful and difficult for conventional disk image software and backups to handle.

Simply speaking, dynamic disks offer more management flexibility without the partition limitation of conventional (or "basic" in Microsoft-speak) storage. Dynamic disks can contain an unlimited number of volumes, but they cannot contain partitions or logical drives.

Volumes in dynamic disks can span several physical disks (spanned disks), or be striped across multiple disks for better performance (in striping, parts of the same file are physically located on multiple physical disk drives). Volumes in dynamic disks can also be mirrored or set up as a RAID 5 array. Dynamic volumes can even be confined to a single disk.

Since you can perform disk and volume operations on dynamic disks without restarting Windows, dynamic storage gives storage administrators a lot of options to deal with the rising flood of data. However, because dynamic disk volumes are usually virtual volumes rather than contiguous chunks of space on a single disk, they pose special problems for backup and especially for disk imaging software.

Dynamic storage is a good-news/bad-news proposition. While dynamic disks offer new powerful tools, they also have some serious limitations that aren't present with conventional disks. Many of these limits are related to backup and restoration.

Dynamic storage can scatter pieces of files across several disks, which means that many conventional disk imaging tools that read blocks off the disk sequentially won't capture a usable image.

To recover files from the dynamic disk volumes, follow these steps:

1. Run free data recovery software - EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition and then select Complete Recovery button on the main window.

2. You can see the list of all partitions and dynamic disk volumes on your computer.

3. Choose one of them and press the "NEXT" button (if you are familiar with file system details, you can change "Option" before pressing the "NEXT" button).

4. This step will launch the Intelligent Searching module to scan the selected volume automatically.

5. You will see select recognized partition page which list found file systems in this volume.

6. And then, "Building Directory Tree" will list the found files, and you can check the files by sort.

7. After this scanning is finished, you'll see file/folder tree and click "File Preview" to preview.

Tips: If you want to wipe the data on a partition completely to protect your privacy, please refer to How to delete and wipe partition?

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