I am unable to create dynamic disks in Windows 7

Question

I have recently installed Win7 in my lenovo laptop. So, I could make 2 drives and one of which has got win7. Now as I want to create more disks, I first shrunk the drive from 300 GB to 100 GB.

Now I have 200 GB unallocated disk space. So, when I am trying to create new disks, its showing me error "Unable to create disk." I am aware that they are dynamic disks.

Why that's happening? and how to solve. After creating dynamic disks, I would like to make them as basic disks. How it is possible?

Answer 1

Why that's happening?

It is not possible to have a bootable Windows installation on a dynamic disk.

Once you convert your disk to a dynamic disk, the entire physical drive is dynamic regardless of its partitions. With that in mind, it does not matter whether you shrink the system partition, you will still not be able to convert the drive itself to a dynamic disk.

After creating dynamic disks, I would like to make them as basic disks. How it is possible?

It is not possible to convert back to basic disk and keep data intact. You have to back up your data to a different disk, delete all partitions on the dynamic disk and only then convert the disk back to basic.

Answer 2

I've not much played around with the vanilla disk management tool in windows (other than quick reference or to change a drive letter) since XP when I got onto Acronis tools; their disk director tool is awesome (as well as their backup software).

I would recommend trying a third party program such as that; whilst installing windows 7 on my gaming machine I was having problems with windows formatting and partitioning my drives....until I found out it was getting confused with multiples plugged in and would only work with a single drive in the system. This was at the bios level however but there may be problems similar at the OS level also?!