recover unreadable dynamic disk

[GDH]

Recover My Files is not a disk repair tool, so it will not "fix" the problem with Windows not seeing your drive. Recover My Files can only be used to recover the data from it and save it to another drive.

You can try a disk repair utility, but be careful becasue by nature they change the contents of the disk - this means that if it does not work you can actually make things worse and make data recovery more difficult.

[smokey]

My 200Gb slave disk, when moved to another PC came up as Dynamic Disk unreadable, and I didn't want to convert it to basic, as windows warns all data will be lost.
DiskPatch (Dos Application) will rebuild the partitioning information and disk will come back online as basic. All data intact!!!
Warning: For disks >137GB, make sure WinXP SP2 is installed or it won't be able to address some files and chkdsk will delete orphaned files. No data will be lost, it's just the pointers to the addresses. Simply install back in a WinXP SP2 machine and run chkdsk again to rebuild pointers.

[space_coyote]

I selected the 5 default files, but all that is recovered are those ones. It hasn't rebuilt the drive as far as I can tell. I did manage to get a lot of my music and picture files, so I'm grateful for that.

What I do need though is to recover my .iso files. I've been through the list several times, and I don't see that extension. Is it possible to recover .iso files with this software?

[GDH]

What type of search did your run?

Did you first try the Fast Format Recover of the physical drive?
Did you then try a Complete Format Recover of the physical drive searching for the default file types?

[space_coyote]

Fast format did not recover anything, so I did the complete format with the default files. The only thing that was recovered were those default files, I couldn't see anything else.

[GDH]

If the Format Recover options did not work then the only explanation for not getting the file and folder structure back is that the original Master File Table has been destroyed.

Your only option is to run a "Complete File Search" for specific file types. We have looked at ISO files in the past - there was a reason we were not able to add this file type, but it escapes me now !?!? I shall have another look at ISO files in the office this week and see what can be done.