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Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > Hard Drives > Restoring Data to the same drive?? Possible??

Restoring Data to the same drive?? Possible??

Forum Storage : Hard Drives Restoring Data to the same drive?? Possible??

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My actual problem is to do with my 700 gig storage disk drive being Dynamic. It appears i have accidentally changed my dynamic disk into a basic disk in Disk Management in administrative tools. I did not format the drive, and the space is unallocated, and there's actually nothing physically wrong with the drive.
I have used a data recovery wizard to scan the partition, and am able to view all of my files.

So basically, my question is very straight forward....
Would it be possible for me to recover all the files from this drive, onto the same drive??
its 700 gigs and i have 500 of it filled. I would rather not have to go out and purchase a new hard drive. Everything i have read on the data recovery software FAQ has told me not to recover to the "bad" drive, but my drive is not bad. So if i recover it to the same drive, will it just let windows see it as a basic disk without having to format???

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Reply to sunni16
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You should be able to change it back to a dynamic disk. This is how Microsoft says to do that: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309044

Reply to Chasas

"Before you change a dynamic disk back to a basic disk, note that all existing volumes must be deleted from the disk before you can convert it back to a basic disk. If you want to keep your data, back up the data, or move your data to another volume. "

This is what i am trying to avoid at this point. If i want to allocate and have windows recognize my storage disk, all of my data will be formatted.

My question is "can i restore my lost data using a data recovery program, to the same disk if my drive is in working order?"

Reply to sunni16

Where is your data backed up to? Regardless of this issue, you need to have a backup, if you care about your data.

Once you have anything going on with a hard drive, physical, logical, formatting, partitions, anything that puts your data at risk ... back it up!!

To answer your specific question, I think you can't recover to the same drive, it will need space to recover the files. Or it will start overwriting files, which isn't good.

Reply to gtvr
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