Use dynamic disk windows 7

To manage dynamic disk in Windows , such as converting a basic disk to a dynamic disk , you can use Window Disk Management. That can help you change Windows 7 basic disk into a dynamic one without damaging all the partitions and data on basic disk. They will turn into simple volume after conversion. This Windows built-in dynamic disk manager also allows you to create, delete, format, shrink or extend dynamic volume.

It has a built-in dynamic disk manager. On one hand, it covers all basic dynamic volume management features like extend, shrink and resize, create, delete dynamic volumes. You can download the free demo and check out how to convert dynamic disk step by step. Step 1. Step 3. Now, you have two options: "Convert a dynamic disk back to basic disk" and "Convert any dynamic volume to basic partition".

Here we choose first option. To know more about the different volumes:. Usually, users create simple volume when their PC only contains one dynamic disk. You can make full use of storage in this way. A striped volume can't be extended and it does not provide fault tolerance. If one volume is accessible, you can enter the mirrored volume to retrieve files.

In some circumstances, you might want to convert dynamic disk back to basic disk. However, Disk Management needs to format the hard drive to finish the conversion. And refer to the following steps to see how it works:. You have known what is a dynamic disk. It owns great flexibility to manage your data, and it is a good way to break the limitation of the basic partition size.

And you can decide if you need to convert a hard drive to dynamic disk in terms of circumstances. What is Dynamic Disk? What is dynamic disk? Dynamic disks provide features that basic disks do not, such as the ability to create volumes that span multiple disks spanned and striped volumes and the ability to create fault-tolerant volumes mirrored and RAID-5 volumes.

All volumes on dynamic disks are known as dynamic volumes. Dynamic disks offer greater flexibility for volume management because they use a database to track information about dynamic volumes on the disk and about other dynamic disks in the computer. Because each dynamic disk in a computer stores a replica of the dynamic disk database, for example, a corrupted dynamic disk database can repair one dynamic disk by using the database on another dynamic disk. The location of the database is determined by the partition style of the disk.

Dynamic disks are a separate form of volume management that allows volumes to have noncontiguous extents on one or more physical disks. These features enable you to perform tasks such as converting basic disks into dynamic disks, and creating fault-tolerant volumes. To encourage the use of dynamic disks, multi-partition volume support was removed from basic disks, and is now exclusively supported on dynamic disks.

Another difference between basic and dynamic disks is that dynamic disk volumes can be composed of a set of noncontiguous extents on one or multiple physical disks.

By contrast, a volume on a basic disk consists of one set of contiguous extents on a single disk. Because of the location and size of the disk space needed by the LDM database, Windows cannot convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk unless there is at least 1 MB of unused space on the disk.

Regardless of whether the dynamic disks on a system use the MBR or GPT partition style, you can create up to 2, dynamic volumes on a system, although the recommended number of dynamic volumes is 32 or less. For details and other considerations about using dynamic disks and volumes, see Dynamic disks and volumes. Unless specified otherwise, Windows initially partitions a drive as a basic disk by default.

You must explicitly convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk. However, there are disk space considerations that must be accounted for before you attempt to do this. Partition styles , also sometimes called partition schemes , is a term that refers to the particular underlying structure of the disk layout and how the partitioning is actually arranged, what the capabilities are, and also what the limitations are. To boot Windows, the BIOS implementations in xbased and xbased computers require a basic disk that must contain at least one master boot record MBR partition marked as active where information about the Windows operating system but not necessarily the entire operating system installation and where information about the partitions on the disk are stored.

This information is placed in separate places, and these two places may be located in separate partitions or in a single partition. All other physical disk storage can be set up as various combinations of the two available partition styles, described in the following sections.

For more information about other system types, see the TechNet topic on partition styles. Dynamic disks follow slightly different usage scenarios, as previously outlined, and the way they utilize the two partition styles is affected by that usage. Because dynamic disks are not generally used to contain system boot volumes, this discussion is simplified to exclude special-case scenarios.

For more detailed information about partition data block layouts, and basic or dynamic disk usage scenarios related to partition styles, see How Basic Disks and Volumes Work and How Dynamic Disks and Volumes Work. All xbased and xbased computers running Windows can use the partition style known as master boot record MBR.