Dynamic disks support different volume types including fault-tolerant mirrored volumes. Each dynamic disk contains an LDM database at its end. When you create a mirror volume, the LDM database records two component entries for each one-half of the mirror. At times, when you try to create or add such mirror volume to a hard disk, you might receive an error and the process might fail. This occurs when the disk contains three or more partitions, which you might need to delete to solve the existing issue. Since it causes data loss, you will need to use your backup or a powerful Windows Partition Recovery software to recover the lost data.
To illustrate this, consider that you use a Dynamic disk in Windows 2000 based system. You try to add a mirror volume and the below error message pops up:
“Logical Disk Manager
Requested operation is not supported.”
You receive this error when the hard disk contains three or more pre-existing partitions.
Cause
You fail to add mirror volume to the hard disk when the following conditions are true:
You have upgraded the dynamic disk from basic disk
You are not using a pure dynamic disk and it contains three or more hard-linked partitions. Hard-linked entries are legacy partition table entries in Logical Disk Manager (LDM) database after you upgrade the disk from basic to dynamic.
Solution
You need to use any of the below methods to solve the discussed issue:
To allow mirroring operation to occur, you need to free up a LDM database entry that is hard-linked. For this, you should delete a simple volume and recreate it. Restore data from backup.
You can also select another dynamic volume that has required unallocated space available
Using the free space of dynamic disk, create a simple volume of same size as of volume required to be mirrored. Backup your data to this new simple volume and delete the original one. Use this unallocated space thus created to add a mirror to this new simple volume.
If you find any partition loss issues after using any of the methods above and no clean backup is available, use Partition Recovery tool to recover them. Windows Partition Recovery utilities employ high-end algorithms to scan and recover lost, missing or damaged partitions without harming the actual contents.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is a reliable and advanced data recovery tool to recover lost partitions. It supports Windows 7 RC1, Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000 operating systems. Using powerful scanning algorithms, it is a fully-featured Partition Recovery Software tool that is compatible with FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 file systems.