Hard disks can be of two types dynamic and basic and depending on what type of work you want out of them you can change them to either one you like. If you are a beginner you might be wondering what is a Dynamic Disk and What is a Basic disk in the computer and where does it show whether you have a dynamic disk or a basic disk and if you have a dynamic disk then how to change dynamic disk to basic disk without losing any data.
First of all, what are we referring a disk to, by disk here we mean hard disk in the computer and as I already said the disk can be dynamic or basic. Basic disks are commonly used disks in windows and basic disks are those which contains partitions such as primary partitions and logical drives on the other hand dynamic disks provides features that basic disks cannot, it can split or share between disks or among disks or you can say they have the ability to create fault-tolerant volumes.
Most of the personal computers run on basic disks but many professions advice to use dynamic disks in order to get more control and more functionalities out of your disk, so you convert your disk to either one you want but sometimes changing your basic disk to dynamic disk can be a mistake. Most of the time people change their basic disks to dynamic willingly but there are few cases of this going wrong.
You can change your partitions to dynamic disk but you should never change the partition containing the operating system into dynamic disk because if you reboot after that you will find only a cursor blinking on white screen which means your computer can’t open which can be an issue and this is why we are here today to teach you how to convert dynamic disk to basic disk.
In the title, it is written how to change dynamic disk to basic disk without data loss but in some cases where you can’t open your operating system, you will not be able to change your disk to basic so easily. So for desperate situations, I am including some ways to change your disk but it might result in loss of data. So here we go.
How To Change Dynamic Disk To Basic Disk
1) Using Disk Management
The easiest way to change dynamic disk to basic disk is using the Disk Management.To use the disk management you should be able to open you computer which i already said you will not be abl to if you even changed your C:// drive to dynamic but only if other primary disks are dynamic you can easily change them to basic.
To change your disk to basic first you need to right-click all the volumes you want to convert and then delete those volumes and when all the volumes have been deleted you can click on the disk 0 and right-click on it and choose change it to basic.
2) Using Command Prompt (Might lead to loss in data)
This is one of the most used methods which really works but as told earlier it can result in loss of data.To do this we are going to open command prompt and here are the steps(write everything without the quotes).
- Open Command Prompt
- Type “diskart”
- Now type “list disk” and then select the disk number.
- Type “select disk” to select the disk number.
- Now type “detail disk”.
- Now type “select volume 0” (replace 0 with the volume number)
- Now type “delete volume 0”
- Now type “select disk 0” again to select the disk
- Now type “convert to basic” to convert it to basic.
3) Using Booting Software (When you cannot open the operating system)
When you convert the partition containing the system file either willingly or by mistake you might not be able to open the operating system again and thus the anxiety starts as you cannot open your computer and there’s not much on web that can help you and I am telling you this by experience as it happened to me just the other day and that is why I thought I should share this with you.
Now there are two ways to do this and I am telling you guys that both of these ways works as I just tried them out yesterday.
1)Using Boot Software
Using Boot Software like Wondershare Liveboot you can open the operating system UI. To do this download Wondershare Liveboot from their official website and make a bootable USB or a bootable DVD using PowerISO.Then start the boot process and as the operating system starts to connect to internet and download any Partitioner Wizard to change dynamic disk to basic disk.
2) As An External Drive
Now you might be wondering what do I mean by an external drive, what I mean is make your laptop disk drive an external hard drive for some computer. Now you might be wondering how to do that, you just need to take your Hard disk out of laptop/computer then need the cable that can connect it to other computer using USB.
I was lucky because I had ripped off a Seagate Hard disk and was able to use its USB cable and parts to connect my Laptop hard disk to another laptop as an external device. Now that it is connected you can go to device manager and there you will find your hard disk as external disk now you can just left click and chose to convert it to dynamic, it says you might lose some data but there’s no loss of data at all.
So these were some of the best ways to try to change dynamic disk to basic disk. If you are facing any problems while doing this feel free to ask in comments and we will be there to help you in any way we can.
As said before, if you want to use the Windows built-in disk management to convert dynamic disk to basic, you need to delete all the volumes on the dynamic disk. Now, with the help of EaseUS Partition Master, you can do it directly and keep all the volumes intact without any data loss.