dynamic disk offline in Vista Home Premium

[jlockley]

A data disk transfered from a w2k machine shows in Vista Home Premium as dynamic and offline. The option to bring online or import is not available.
I have read that Home Premium does not support dynamic disks from W2k, xp, etc (Pro or Ultimate would, but that's anotyher $170). I am currently backing up all drives to a WD USB drive, but I thought I'd check here before converting the two disks.
Does anyone have a trick for this? (This is a continuation of a thread started in Hardware - the topic appears to be more vista specific than it was.).

 

[smah]

This really isn't Vista specific, since the same would be true for the Home version of XP as well. Unfortanately, the Home version was never intended to work with dynamic disks.

 

[jlockley]

Nice thing to learn at this late date. Since I am trying to import/register the drives in Vista, let's leave it at Vista related, then. So the rephrased question would be whether anyone has been able to transfer data directly from dynamic disks. (Ie, not via a USB drive, which I am in the process of trying, or using a 3rd party app to convert without data loss, which I will try after everything is backed up to a faretheewell.) Since dynamic disks must be dealt with in pairs (so I read) I wonder specifically if anyone has had success by linking them both correctly at the same time. Note that the board

I inquired here a while back what the various drawbacks and advantages of each system were (and did some research elsewhere) and did not come up with the issue of moving drives from one OS to another. Of course I didn't realize that the drives (two, which makes sense) were in fact dynamic. I probably would not have made the choice for Home Premium had I had an inkling of the challenge. Are there any other surprises beyond this and the ongoing driver issues one should know- ie reasons to really consider an upgrade to ultimate?

This is a home office machine secondary but not networked (yet) to a downtown office machine. Wireless network to visiting laptops, occasionally mine. Intended mostly for data management and correspondence, although I might want to expand it for some media use as well. DSL Connection.

Thanks for input.