False System Partition Issue and Recovery

Disks that contain dynamic partitions are called dynamic disks. These disks support multi-partition volumes and store partition information on the disk itself. LDM or Logical Disk Manager is the Windows subsystem, purposed for managing subsystem. It utilizes the information of LDM databases that hold partitioning information. Basically a dynamic disk is comprised of MBR, followed by LDM partition and LDM database.

Dynamic disks support various operations like creating or deleting mirrored, striped, simple, spanned or RAID-5 volumes, removing mirror and breaking mirrored volume into two and such others. But sometimes users report that when they view Disk Management Tool, two different volumes are seen enlisted as system partition, while the original dynamic system disk is visible as Offline or Missing. The attempts of deleting this fake system volume fail with the following error message:

"Cannot delete the system volume on this disk"

Also, user fails to reformat this partition, though t clicks Yes when the following error message pops up:

"This volume is no longer the current system volume. All data on this volume will be lost. Are you sure you want to format this volume?"

The root causes of this issue can be:

• It may happen that user has manually broken system partition mirror and LDM private region database incorrectly shows the shadow drive as a system partition.

• Two separate system volumes may also appear if previously system partition was mirrored to another dynamic disk in Windows 2000. Then if both halves became and mirrors failed, Windows 2000 was reinstalled. This resulted into a new system volume but with dynamic disk database having reference to the original system volume.

• If this dynamic disk set has been imported into current system and has the flagged system partition in LDM, user may see two system volumes.

To correct this issue, we need to manually delete all the partitions and repartition the disk after backing up all the d of other volumes. Incomplete state of backup may create partition recovery software needs. It can be accomplished using Recovery Console diskpart command. Though due to left information of dynamic disks in databases, dynamic system disk still appears with earlier issues, but it is of no harm.

Backup must always be checked and should contain all required files. However if backup fails, it requires Partition Recovery Software to scan and recover lost partitions’ information. ThesePartition Recovery applications are graphically rich tools that recover lost data in all logical partition loss cases. Partition Recovery Software are safe to be used.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the best utility to safely carry out Partition Recovery. The application is interactive and has read-only design. It can thoroughly examine the drive for lost/missing/deleted partitions, recover and restore them. This Partition Recovery Software can be used with FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 based disks. The software provides advanced recovery options. It can be used with Windows Vista, Server 2003, XP and 2000.