Windows – Dynamic Disk (software RAID) not accessible after windows 10 upgrade

hard drivepartitioningraidwindows 10

I have two 2TB drives set up as a single volume in Windows. In Disk Management these physical drives are listed as Dynamic. I set them up in Windows 7, and they continued to function fine when upgrading to Windows 8.1. I boot off of a separate drive (SSD). I upgraded to Windows 10 and now I am unable to access the drive.

In Windows Explorer this drive shows up just as "Local Disk (D:)" — this drive letter is correct, but that is not the name I had assigned it. Attempting to open this drive brings up a modal message box titled "Location is not available" with the text "D:\ is not accessible. Incorrect function." and the only option is "OK".

In the Disk Management utility, I see D: listed as the correct size (3726GB) and listed as 100% free (should be more like 70% free). Layout listed a "Striped", Type "Dynamic", File System "RAW", Status "Healthy". It doesn't have a name listed here, either.

Below that panel, both physical drives are listed, and both are listed as Dynamic, Online, Healthy, with the correct individual capacities. They are listed here as RAW as well. The "Reactivate Volume" option is greyed out.

Selecting the "Rescan Disks" option from the Actions menu has no effect.

In the "Tools" tab of the Properties window for the drive, the error checking tool gives the error "The disk check could not be performed because Windows can't access the disk."

The volume does not show up in the "Optimize" window.

Under the Hardware tab of the Properties window, both physical drives are listed and say "This device is working properly."

Both drives are Hitachi drives, listed with the model "HDS5C3020ALA632".

I'm not sure what further steps I can take to find more relevant information or how I can get Windows to recognize/mount the volume. I don't have any irreplaceable data on that drive, but I do have a fair amount of media it will be inconvenient to rip back to the computer as well as my Steam library I'd rather not have to re-download.

If there's not a way to get Windows 10 to recognize and mount the volumes, I would be happy with another solution that would let me boot up and read the data so I could move it to my external drive and reformat the volume. I've got a USB stick with a bootable Xubuntu install sitting around somewhere, but I'm not sure if I would be able to see something in a pair of drives set up as software RAID through Windows.

Best Answer

Try to convert dynamic to basic using the Windows interface:

  1. Back up all volumes on the disk you want to convert from dynamic to basic.
  2. Open Computer Management (Local).
  3. In the console tree, click Computer Management (Local), click Storage, and then click Disk Management.
  4. Right-click each volume on the dynamic disk you want to convert to a basic disk, and then click Delete Volume for each volume on the disk.
  5. When all volumes on the disk have been deleted, right-click the disk, and then click Convert To Basic Disk.

Command line should Works on Windows 10. This link refers to Windows Server 2003.

command line how to

If you can´t or you want to save your data, then try testdisk tool. It worked fine for me both to recover data and to convert dynamic to basic without data loss. In this case, backing up is optional but always recommended.

testdisk download

testdisk-how to

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