Data storage in basic disk uses partition-oriented disks, while in dynamic disk it uses volume-oriented disks. Windows Disk Management allows you to convert a disk initialized as basic disk to dynamic disk. While doing so, it checks the disk for several parameters. The disk process might stop if it finds any of the fault tolerant volume in unexpected state, inaccessible or unhealthy. Whether the inaccessible or unhealthy volume has been selected for upgrade or not, Disk Management fails to proceed further. To solve such problems, you need to either repair or delete the corrupt volume. After deleting the volume, if no clean backup is available, you will need to use data recovery software to recover data thus lost.

For an instance, consider that you try to upgrade a basic disk to dynamic disk in Windows 2000 using Disk Management tool. You might fail to perform this task and come across with the below error message:

“[Disk Management] Cannot proceed with the upgrade. Unable to get information about an existing basic volume.”

Further attempts of converting the disk also result into same error message.

Cause

Disk management might fail to convert the disk if any of the following conditions is true:

Disk Management verifies if whether or not all disk partitions that are required to be upgraded are accounted for volume manager and are enumerated. The disk conversion process might stop if the volume manager is unaware of any disk volume. This usually occurs of the disk partition has been created using a tool other than Windows 2000 Disk Management and the system has not been restarted. Windows 2000 Disk Management also checks if all the volumes on disk have valid status and is acceptable. Also, it makes sure that the all the disk volumes having at least one extent should have all extents in the group of user selected disks. If the disk comes out with a fault tolerant member with broken or failed redundancy status, the upgrade process might fail.

Solution

Follow these solutions to solve the above mentioned problem:

Restart the system. It will ensure that all disk partitions and volumes are recognized and enumerated Repair the unhealthy volume. If it is not feasible, delete the volume, recreate it and restore lost data from backup.

While no valid backup is available, you need to use data recovery utilities of recovering lost data.Designed to use powerful scanning algorithms, these are powerful partition recovery applications that offer safe and comprehensive results. Data Recovery Software provide you graphically rich user interface and require no prior technical understanding.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is a fully-featured and the most trusted utility to recover lost data from Windows 7 RC1, Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000 based systems. This data recovery application employs high-end scanning algorithms and provides advanced set of recovery features. It supports FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 file system drives.