How to recover data from a Dynamic hard disk without formatting?

[eydata]

Hello, I am new to the forum.

I am currently using a laptop on Windows Vista Home Premium. I recently bought a external hard disk case so that I could use my old hard disks for backup and to retrieve data via USB 2.0. I was able to access data from two hard disks that were "Basic" but could not read the third 500gb hard disk that was a "Dynamic".

In Disk Management, the computer recognises the dynamic hard disk but says it is "Offline". I did a search and realised that Dynamic hard disks could not be read using Vista Home Premium. The only options available when right clicking are; convert to basic disk, properties and help.

I was wondering if there is any way I could recover/access the data from the Dynamic hard disk without having to convert it to basic (which would mean formatting/deleting data on it)?

I also tried accessing the dynamic hard disk through the external hard disk case on my friend's laptop which is running XP Professional but still I can't read it.

I read on another thread on this forum that I could use a program to retrieve the data from a basic hard disk converted from dynamic, but since I haven't converted/formatted the dynamic yet, I was wondering if I could retrieve the data by any other means?

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
eydata

[GDH]

Hi,

Download Recover My Files from Data Recovery Software to Undelete Files; Disk recovery; Recover Deleted Files and install it to your C: drive.

1. In the first wizard window, select "Fast Format Recover" and click Next;

2. In the drive selection window, do you see a "physical" drive that is the same size as your problem drive? If so, put a tick in the box next to it and click next.

This search should take less than 60 minutes to run, after which you should see all your files and folders in Folder View of the results screen. Click on the files here to see if you can preview their content. Are you able to see them?