Stuff I Do

We had a workstation that controls one of the CNC machines and it was running Windows NT4 with a FAT 2GB partition. We wanted to move it to the corporate standard of Windows XP and not having any of the install software we thought we would try just upgrading the in place installation and see if the applications still worked. Not a big deal if it did not because we have a reinstallation image the manufacturer sent with the full NT4 install with all the applications.

The upgrade went smoothly, but we were still stuck with a 2GB partition. You can’t extend a volume when the disk is basic so it was converted to dynamic. Found out at that point that you can’t extend a boot volume even if it is a dynamic disk. At this point none of the known disk partition software packages can handle a dynamic disk so we were stuck and if we would have left it as a basic disk one of these 3rd party partition software packages would have extended the partition.

Microsoft does not officially support anyway of converting from a dynamic disc back to a basic disc without reformatting the hard drive. Not wanting to take that route did a little searching and found an article (http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1806) that explains how to manually edit the physical disk to set it back to a basic disk. The instructions work great and I only found that you have to delete an unknown volume at the end of the process.

Once the disk was back to basic, the unknown volume was deleted and a chkdisk had been preformed, I downloaded and booted Gparted to do the disk resize. That went smoothly and another chkdisk later the partition has gone from 2GB to the 40GB of the full drive. It is nice not having errors about that workstation running out of space and not being able to apply the hotfixes because of lack of drive space.

Below is the instruction from Ars Technica just incase that post disappears:

**Disclaimer: This ONLY works if you have NOT used ANY of the “new” features of dynamic disks such as extending a partition or software RAID. This is an expert-level procedure, so if you don’t know what you are doing, you shouldn’t be attempting this.**
1) Install dskprobe.exe on the system. (This is one of the utilities in the Windows 2000 support tools on the install CD, and can be installed by simply copying the .exe file to the hard drive.)
2) Run dskprobe.exe on the system.
3) Select the Drives menu and “Physical Drive. . .”
4) Double click on the drive that you want to convert back to a basic disk. Click the “Set Active” button next to that drive.
5) From the Sectors menu, select “Read”
6) Accept the defaults (begin sector 0, read 1 sector) and click “Read”
7) In the editor, go to the “01C0″ line and the third bit should be a “42″. Change that to a “07″. **Note, a few machines have had this on the “01D0″ line instead. I don’t know what that means, so I wouldn’t try it unless it is on a pure test box. *****
From the Sectors menu, select “Write”. Confirm all dialog boxes. **Note: This is the step that will hose your box if you have not followed the above instructions correctly.**
9) Exit dskprobe.exe. Reboot
10) Run chkdsk on the affected logical drive(s). If any errors are found, do a chkdsk /f to fix them. Done.