How to Convert Mirrored Volume to Basic Disk without Losing Data?

What is a mirrored volume?

Dynamic disk is a different disk format from basic disk. On a dynamic disk, you can create simple/ spanned/ striped/ mirrored/ RAID5 volumes. With these helpful functions, it provides better service of protecting data and enhancing read/write performance.

The Mirrored volume is a volume that stores an exact copy of the data from another volume. It is used for fault tolerance because it can write data into two disks simultaneously. When one disk fails or corrupts, you still have a backup to replace the failed or corrupted one. Because of this advantage, many people covert their basic disks partitions to dynamic mirrored volumes.

How to convert mirrored volumes to basic volumes?

Although the mirrored volumes can serve as a backup device in case the primary device fails, sometimes you may want to convert the mirrored volumes to basic partition. Then how can you get it done? There are two methods you can try.

Method 1. Apply Disk Management (Data Loss)

One way is to use the Windows native Disk Management to directly convert the entire dynamic disk to a basic disk, but you have to delete the mirrored volumes or other dynamic volumes before conversion because it can only convert an empty dynamic disk back to basic, so if you want to convert dynamic mirrored volume to basic.

To avoid data loss on the dynamic volumes, you can back up them before attempting to converting it to basic disk. When all volumes on the disk have been deleted, right-click the disk, and then click ”Convert to Basic Disk”.

Method 2. Use professional dynamic disk converter (Data Safe)

If you don’t want to delete any dynamic volumes for conversion, you can switch to AOMEI Partition Assistant Server, which is compatible with Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP and Server 2003/2008/2011/2012/2016/2019. This partition manager comes with “Dynamic Disk Manager” and “Dynamic Disk Converter”. The Dynamic Disk Manager can help manage dynamic volumes easily such as extend, shrink and resize, create, delete dynamic volumes.

The Dynamic Disk Converter supports converting a whole dynamic disk to a basic disk without deleting any volumes or losing any data. Moreover, it is also able to convert dynamic volumes to basic volumes by cloning it (sector-by-sector clone) to a basic disk. The operation is quite simple:

Note: this software cannot convert a 2TB+ dynamic disk to a basic one. If the dynamic disk is of GPT partition style, it will be an MBR basic disk after conversion.

Step 1. Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant Server. Click “Convert” in the top toolbar, and choose “Dynamic Disk Converter”.

Step 2. Here you can choose “Convert a dynamic disk back to basic disk” or “ Convert any dynamic volume to basic partition”. If you just want to convert mirrored volumes to basic partition, not including other dynamic volumes, select the second method.

Step 3. Select the dynamic mirrored volumes you want to convert to the basic disk by cloning and click on “Next”.

Step 4. Select the unallocated space on a basic disk to accommodate the source mirrored volume and click on “Next”.

Step 5. Click “Proceed” to commit the pending operation.

Then you will find the mirrored volumes and inside data have been cloned to a basic partition as a copy. Then you can delete the mirrored volumes on the dynamic disk to free disk space.

Summary

See? With the help of AOMEI Partition Assistant Server, you can easily change dynamic mirrored volumes to basic disk partition without damaging inside data in Windows PC and Server. Actually, it also provides many other fantastic functions to help you manage the disk partitions, like clone partition, clone hard disk, transfer OS to SSD, allocate free space from one partition to another partition, convert MBR and GPT without deleting partitions, etc.