How to Remove Dynamic Disk Partitions?

What is dynamic disk?

The dynamic disk is a disk attribute, whereas the basic disk is our most widely used disk attribute. Only continuous space on the same disk may be partitioned into one partition on basic drives. But on the dynamic disk, there is no disk partition, it is named after "volume". There is a significant difference between a volume and a partition: a partition can only exist on one physical disk, but a volume can span up to 32 physical drives.

Dynamic disks communicate with one another, partition data over many drives, and duplicate data. They may hold up to 2000 volumes, each of which acts as an independent disk or partition.

At any one moment, a computer can only generate one dynamic disk group. Logical Disk Manager is used to build and manage dynamic disks (LDM).

LDM stands for Logical Disk Manager, and it is a hidden database of 1MB at the end of the dynamic disk. The 1MB database stores all of the volume information on a single disk, as well as certain relevant information on each dynamic disk, such as drive letter, volume label, volume starting sector, volume size, the file system of Volume, current dynamic disk, and so on.

If your computer has many dynamic drives, each one will include the aforementioned information. When you remove a dynamic disk from your system, the significance of each dynamic disk causes a "Missing" disk to appear in Windows Disk Management. All of this information will be kept in the LDM database.

3 tools to remove dynamic disk partitions

Sometimes people want to delete the dynamic volume to adjust the disk space. Thus in this part, we’ll show you how to remove the dynamic partition on the disk.

Tool 1. Using Disk Management to remove dynamic disk partition

Disk Management can help users to modify the disk and partition settings. You can easily remove volume on the dynamic disk with this built-in tool.

Step 1. Press Win + R to open Run. Type "diskmgmt.msc" and hit Enter to open Disk Management.

Step 2. Find the dynamic disk, right-click its volume and select "Delete Volume". Wait for the process completes. Repeat the step to delete all volumes on the dynamic disk.

Tool 2. Using CMD to delete partition on dynamic disk

You can also try CMD to use the commands to remove the dynamic disk partition.

Step 1. Click Start and type "Command Prompt" in the search box. Right-click the Command Prompt from the list, and select "Run as administrator".

Step 2. At the prompt, type "diskpart" and press "Enter".

Step 3. Type the following commands successively and press "Enter" after each input.

• list disk
• select disk n (where n is the disk number of the dynamic disk)
• detail disk

• select volume m (where m is the volume number of the dynamic disk)
• delete volume

Tips: repeat “select volume m” and “delete volume” if you have more than one volume on the dynamic disk.

Tool 3. Convert to basic disk without data loss and delete partition safely

To remove a single volume on a dynamic disk, the Windows built-in tools are enough. However, there are 2 situations that may ask users to convert dynamic disk at first:

◤Delete volume option is greyed out in the Disk Management
◤Only want to convert one volume to basic partition for OS installation

And if both Disk Management and CMD can’t delete dynamic partition, you also need to try to convert to a basic disk. Therefore, to protect your data on the disk, here we recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, an all-in-one disk and partition manager.

This tool can convert disk to dynamic and basic disk without data loss. The “Dynamic Disk Converter” function supports converting a disk and converting any dynamic volume to a basic partition.

Step 1. Install and launch the program. Click “Convert” in the top toolbar, and choose “Dynamic Disk Converter”.

Step 2. In the next screen, select a method according to your needs and click "Next” to continue.

Step 3. Check the dynamic disk you want to convert to basic and click Next. Then check the confirmation option and click “Proceed” to execute.

Step 4. When the conversion is done, click OK to restart your computer. Then you’ll see that the disk has been converted to a basic disk.

Now you can try to delete partitions or install Windows on the partition.

Final lines

To remove dynamic disk partitions, you can use built-in tools. If there are other problems that make you can’t successfully delete volume on a dynamic disk, you can use AOMEI Partition Assistant to convert dynamic disk to basic without losing data.

Besides dynamic management, this tool can also clone disk, convert disk to MBR/GPT without data loss, allocate free space, and so on. In addition, it has the Server Edition for Windows Server users to easily manage their devices.