Through a series of events inspired by my desire to have NTFS on my W2k/Win98 w/ logical partition config, I now have a message from logical disk manager saying that my hard drive is an unreadable dynamic disk. I can get back to Windows 98 without a problem, and Windows 2000 is running fine. My logical drive seems to have left for the netherworld though. The real problem is this - it won't convert back to a basic disk. Partition Magic 6.0 is spitting back a 183 error with "Unable to find the Windows partition." Oh, I had a stop error when I converted to the dynamic disk upon reboot. I'd like to know what I can do to recover whatever I can. It'd also be nice to figure out what the hell happened when it tried to switch to a dynamic disk. Maybe it had to do with Win98...

Win 98 is not compatible with dynamic disk..Im suprised you can still access 98..try saving all your data in 98 and reverting back to basic...you should be able to do this once....

Having just recently done all the research on dynamic disks, I've got your answer.

1. Win98 shouldn't work on a dynamic disk.
2. You cannot convert to a dynamic disk any other way then by manually doing it in the computer manager.
3. IMPORTANT: There is no way to convert a dynamic disk back to a basic one without losing your data. The only way to do it is to download a little utility called "wipe.exe" from the IBM web site. Boot off a disk, and run wipe. It will do a low level format of your disk and remove the dynamic elements.

Not even an FDISK and format routine will work. You need wipe.

look at microsoft site, dynamic disk is only readable from win2000. Per them you do have to repartition. Adam is right. Once upgraded to dynamic, you cant go back. Nice eh?

I had the same error, and when I looked at the part. table all my partitions were still there, only the type ID-s were changed.
After I changed them back manually (I used a Linux boot disk and fdisk for this purpose, you might do it with some disk editor utility), everything was back to normal.
After that, I tried to convert my disk to dynamic for a few days, and finally succeeded. Ask me if you continue to have problems...

Sorry to all those who went out of their way after all this time, but an embarrassingly simple partition table edit (like TigrrrLily mentioned) solved my woes moments after I posted.

Apparently, W2K had a problem converting my extended partition into the dynamic disk system, and it stopped the conversion process at that point. However, it forgot to reset my partition table settings to the original, so I was left with that unusual situation.

Perhaps that was a pre-SP1 bug (it was a pre-SP1 system. silly me...), but I haven't checked docs lately. I do have one question leftover though - who in the world uses dynamic disks besides those that run mission-critical NT servers? Just doesn't make much sense to me now...

Again, I'm extremely sorry that all of you went through the trouble of helping someone who did not need help. However, I'd like to thank you all for giving me an idea of what may have gone wrong.