any way to restore this backup?

[mattmag]

im using vista ultimate x64. i have 3 hard drives - an 80gb, a 100gb, and a 500gb. i decided to try out dynamic drives today, and ended up rendering my system drive (the 100gb one) unbootable. "no problem", i thought, "i'll just install vista again on the 80gb hard drive, make a backup of the one that doesnt work, convert the 100gb drive back to basic, and restore the image." i have now converted it back to basic, only to find that i can't restore the backup that i made. i used a program caleld r-drive, and it made a .arc file which is on the 500gb dynamic disk. the program can mount the drive and i can see all the contents, but when i try to do a real restore i get a write error. can i somehow either restore the whole backup or rescue all my programs by putting them in this second vista installation (which is on the 80gb basic partition)?

[khvn]

Couple of questions for you:

(1) So the 100G messed up and you "converted it back to basic". What do you mean by this?

(2) What software do you use to restore/backup this drive? This can make a difference.

[mattmag]

i had converted it to a "dynamic disk" using windows disk management. this is what broke it. i changed it back to a "basic disk" after i made the backup, hoping to restore it. i used a program called r-drive, and it made a .arc file (i know i shouldve used a better program, but i cant change that now).

[uesquebeathus]

if you are trying to restore the operating system to the disk that the dynamic overlay was set on you cannot because the overlay is still there. dynamic drive is a method of creating an software overlay on a hard drive, you must remove that overlay, download swiss knife from here:-

http://www.compuapps.com/download/Swissknife/swissknife.htm
format in order to remove the overlay, then try to recover the image that you created.

dynamic drive overlay was originally invented to allow a hard drive of overlarge proportions to be seen in older BIOS motherboards.