Before Windows Vista and Windows 7, you cannot shrink or extend partition in Disk Management, so you may convert a basic disk to dynamic to extend partition, but nowadays many people want to convert dynamic disk to basic.
When you add new disks, you may convert disk to dynamic mistakely. To convert dynamic disk to basic disk, Microsoft provides no method, it tells you to delete all dynamic volumes and then convert dynamic disk to basic disk, bad enough.
Fortunately, there are other methods to convert dynamic disk to basic without data losing.
Why convert dynamic disk to basic disk?
Although dynamic disks contains many advantages than the basic disks, it also brings some problems as bellow:
1. If you converted basic disk to dynamic, you cannot delete these dynamic volumes and reinstall Microsoft Windows operating system with system CD/DVD.
2. You cannot convert dynamic disk to basic disk without data losing in Disk Management, as you need to delete all dynamic volume firstly before converting.
3. In most conditions the dynamic volume still cannot be extended, especially for the system and boot volume, many people would encounter this problem if they need to increase dynamic disk. But due to the limitation of Disk Management, only Simple Volume and Spanned Volume can be extended.
Nowadays, the hard drive price is lower and lower, you may purchase larger hard drive and hardware RAID card for high performance, you don't need dynamic disk again for higher computer performance.
Other problems you should know
- Though Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 can expand partitions, the precondition is that there is unallocated space behind the partition you want to expand. If there is no unallocated space there, you can still choose 'Extend' partition command, but Disk Management will convert basic disk to dynamic.
- On basic disk, you can create only 4 primary partitions or 3 primary partitions plus an extended partition, if you want to create more partitions in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, you have to convert basic disk to dynamic.
No matter you are using dynamic disk originally or convert basic disk to dynamic mistakenly, there are still ways to convert dynamic disk to basic without data losing.
How to convert dynamic disk to basic
Convert dynamic disk to basic via dynamic disk converter, it is able to convert dynamic Simple Volume and Mirrored Volume directly to basic disk. To other dynamic disk volumes, you can copy to another basic disk.
Alternatively, you may keep using dynamic disk, when there is one volume running low, you can change the volume size with dynamic disk manager.