Working with Basic or Dynamic Disks

You may use Active@ Disk Image to backup and restore valuable data from both dynamic and basic disks.

A basic disk uses partition tables supported by all versions of Windows, MSDOS, and Windows NT. It can hold primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives.

A dynamic disk has a different structure that is supported by Windows 2000 and operating systems after Windows 2000. A dynamic disk can hold simple volumes, spanned volumes, mirrored volumes, striped volumes, and RAID-5 volumes. A single dynamic disk may consist of several physical disks.

In the Disk to Image Wizard, basic volumes are listed under each corresponding physical disk. Dynamic volumes are combined into a group named Dynamic volumes. To select all the physical dynamic disks in this group, select the group name. When you select the whole group, all dynamic volumes are included in the backup. The contents of the dynamic volume is stored, however the structure data is not stored. What this means is that the information about dynamic disk (stripe, mirror etc.) is lost.

If you try to create a Raw Disk Image of one dynamic disk consisting of several physical disks you will not make a valid backup that allows you to restore the dynamic disk structure. However, you can create and restore a Raw Disk Image of each physical dynamic disk.

Active@ Disk Image does not allow you to restore the structure of dynamic disks. Nevertheless, you can restore the contents of dynamic disks to basic disks.

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Active@ Data Recovery Software 2008