Ways to Convert Basic Disk to Dynamic Disk Without Data Loss

What is a Basic disk?

A Basic disk is a widely popular variety of compartments operated in a window operating system. A Basic disk is formatted, along with the file system, managed by the primary partition and logical drive. 

Basic disks usually have two modes of partition these are:

• Master Boot Record (MBR)
• GUID partition table (GPT)

Now let us understand what MBR and GPT are.

MBR: 

A Master Boot Record is the partition table that includes the setting where the partition gets categorized in the disk. You can establish four divisions. Three primaries and one extended or all four primaries. The extended separation can contain four logical drives inside it.

GPT: 

Processors running Windows Server 2003 or newer models can pick from MBR and GPT partition styles. Its partition assistance is up to 128 primary partitions.

Operations in Basic disk:

Whether you want to adopt MBR and GPT styles, you can always perform the following operation on the Basic disk.

• First, you can augment the partition and formulate a primary. 
• Then delete the extended partition and primary and logical drives.
• And now, You can format the partition and function at any time.

What is a Dynamic Disk?

Dynamic disk gives good flexibility because it does not use any partition table to protect the track of all partitions. Instead, it uses an entirely hidden logical disk manager and virtual disk service to chase the knowledge about the dynamic partition and volume on the disk.

Dynamic volumes:

The dynamic volume consists of five types of volume, as follows:

Simple Volumes: – It is for purposes like primary partitions on a basic disk.

Mirrored Volumes: – Make a copy of the data included in this volume, and the protocol contributes to drawback understanding.

Striped Volumes: – Allocates I/O requests across disks to expand disk input/output achievement.

Spanned Volumes: – Combines the two disk spaces accessible on the disk.

RAID-5 Volumes: – There or more disks on Stripe’s data and congruity.

Operations in dynamic disk:

Dynamic disks are more flexible than basic disks. So, in this, you can do a lot of systems.

• Establish and delete the simple, striped, spanned, RAID-5 and mirrored volumes. 
• Next, eliminate a mirrored volume or instead crack it into two separate parts of the volume.
• Reactivate a missing disk
• Augment a reasonable or stretched partition.
• Now we have understood well what basic and dynamic disks are, let’s now move to the difference between these two.

Difference between Basic Disk and Dynamic Disk

Basic disk:

• Concept: – Basic Disk works on the concept of partition, partition table, and logical drives.
• Limits: – A hard drive has 3 or 4 absolute distributions with inferior augmented distributions.
• Type: – Basic disk has two types are MBR partition and GPT partition.
• Flexibility: – Partitions created formerly cannot be changed further.
• Multi boots: – Multi-boot format is supported.
• Compatibility: – Supports the old windows operating systems as well.

Dynamic disk: 

• Concept: – In the Dynamic disk partition is done in the volumes.
• Limits: – In a dynamic disk, there are no restrictions.
• Type: – A dynamic disk volume has the following types: Simple volumes, Spanned volumes, Striped volumes, Mirrored volumes, and RAID-5 volumes.
• Flexibility: – Volume can be increased in the Dynamic disk.
• Multi boots: – It doesn’t benefit from multi boots configuration.
• Compatibility: -Dynamic disk is financed from windows 2000 onwards only.

How to Convert a Basic Disk to Dynamic Disk?

Here we have two ways to convert a Basic disk to a dynamic disk so, now let us know the two ways by following the steps given below:

Method 1. By using disk management to convert Basic disk to dynamic disk

Step:01- Search Computer Management from the taskbar and open it. Now, select Disk Management from the options mentioned on the left. And proceed with the below step.

Step:02- Right-click on the Target Basic disk. Select convert to dynamic disk from the list which appears on the system window. Follow all the steps. At the edge of the rotation, you will find two kinds of warnings.

• Warning-1: If the Target Basic disk only contains data partition, you may see the following warning- If you convert the Basic disk to Dynamic disk you may not be able to start the installed volumes on your disk. And will ask you to select Yes or No.

• Warning-2: If the Target Basic disk contains a system partition, you may see the following warning- There is not enough space on your disk to execute this task.

And this is most probably due to the inability to begin the operating system installation from this disk except the existing boot one. Here the Basic disk is not approved to be converted to a dynamic disk.

Method 2. Convert to Dynamic Disk Using Diskpart 

Step:01- Right-click on the window icon and choose Command Prompt (Admin) from the list. 

Now, you will need to accept a user account control interface. After this, push the Yes button to join the command prompt interface. 

Step:02- Now, enter the following command line and click the enter after every command. 

• diskpart
• list disk
• select disk 
• convert dynamic

For incompatible disk management, you might not get any warning on the system. But you can’t obtain this way to convert the system disk to a dynamic disk and you may receive the message saying there is not enough usable space for this operation.

How To Convert a Dynamic Disk to a Basic Disk?

There are three methods for converting a dynamic disk to a Basic disk which is as follows:

Method 1. Using EaseUS Partition Master for Converting Dynamic to Basic Disk Without Data Loss 

Step:01- Firstly, download EaseUS Partition Master and open it in your system.

Step:02- Right-click on the disk which you want to convert and choose convert to Basic disk.

Step:03 – You might get a pop-up notice on your window, click on ok and proceed.

Step:04- Select the Execute 1 Operation button that must be visible at the top left corner. And now, click Apply to start the process of converting the dynamic disk to the Basic disk. After that, you can start using the partition executive resize clone to delete the rest of the partition merge format.

Method 2. Convert Dynamic to Basic with Disk Management

Step:01- Firstly, open the disk management tool and right-click on the dynamic disk, which you want to convert into the Basic disk.

Step:02- Now, to delete volume, click on delete volume for every volume present on the disk.

Step:03- After deleting all volumes, right-click on it and choose to convert to the Basic disk option from the list.

Method 3. Using Diskpart Command to Convert Dynamic Disk to Basic Disk

Step:01- Open command prompt Diskpart window and then write the disk number you want to convert into the Basic disk.

Step:02- Now, write the given command and press enter after executing every command. 

Here, 0 represents the disk number, and 1 is the volume number.

• list disk
• select disk 0
• detail disk 0
• select volume= 1
• delete volume
• select disk 0
• convert basic

Step:03- At the end, enter exit to end the process.

Should I convert a Basic disk to a Dynamic disk?

You do not necessarily need to do so unless you need the advanced software RAID features of dynamic disks. Both the disks comfort MBR and GPT partition style and, if we correlate the Basic disk with the dynamic disk, it favors more volume like simple volume, spanned volume, striped volume, mirrored volume, and RAID-5 volume.

And, with a dynamic disk, you can also perform operations that are not allowed to get executed on a Basic disk as you are not allowed to create a volume with unallocated spaces from different physical basic disks. 

And their dynamic disk gets a plus point. And with a dynamic disk, you can also create a large spanned volume with those unallocated spaces from multiple physical disks. 

In conclusion, if you want to flexibly use the space of disks or improve disk performance in Windows 10, it is not inferior to change the disk to dynamic. 

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