I need help in reactivating a dynamic drive. Here's the situation.

I inadvertently formatted a new WD 500GB SATA drive as dynamic. Once I noticed it, I setup another WD 500GB drive to move the data and reformat. As luck would have it, my Gigabyte GA-8KNXP mobo went out. I installed a new Gigabyte board (did not have to reinstall or repair XP). When I did that, the dynamic drive shows offline. The BIOS sees it, as does the various recover tools (Acronis and R Studio).

Here's what I see as my options:

- Reactivate through XP disk management. I'm a bit skittish to try for fear that there could be something destructive. Am I safe in at least trying this?

- Restore through Acronis or R Studio. What are the pros/cons of this method?

- Send to a data recovery service. Suggestions?

I have always maintained a double backup drive system. This time, though, I was caught a disk transition and have no meaningful back to the data.

Tom

Thanks for any help.

You should be able to reactivate the dynamic disk without data loss.

See Microsoft Technet - Reactivating a Missing or Offline Dynamic Disk.