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How to fix “Invalid Disk” error in Windows 7

by Mike Norman on April 16, 2010

Ive been running windows 7 for a while now, and decided to pull some data off of old hard drives. I plugged in one of my ata drives though a usb device and the disk management said it was an invalid disk. i tried taking it off line and bringing it back online and that just crashed disk management. I did have the option to convert it to a basic disk but that would wipe all data! So here’s what i did to fix it and keep my precious data!
First i downloaded HxD its a free Hex editor. once its installed open the problem disk by clicking “Extras” then “Open Disk” Make sure you open the right disk! your disk management will list your disks starting with 0, this tool will start with 1. this is very important as you could seriously fuck shit up if you don’t do this proper :) . Also, the default option is to open the disk read only, your going to want to uncheck that when your ready to fix your “Invalid disk”.
So we’ve got the broken disk open, scroll down to offset 1C0(the row) and look in the 02 column. that cell should read “42″ which means Dynamic disk, Change it to “07″ and save changes. if your using this drive externally unplug it and plug it back in. otherwise reboot your computer.
That should have re initialized the disk and it will now be readable. if not go into disk management and take the disk offline then bring it back online. and the best part No Data Loss!!! Hope this helps!

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Tagged as: Data Recovery, Invalid Disk, Windows 7

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  • Mauricio

    Works Great, Thanks!!!

  • vajumic

    worked fine, but i had two partitions on that disk. it convertet that disk to basic disk and keeped only one it’s two partitions.

  • http://www.facebook.com/joshyunglee Josh Yung Lee

    thanks alot for the post!!!! saved 2 gigs worth of data that i hadn’t been able to recover for a year!

  • Steve

    Excellent advice, worked a treat, thank you very much

  • Drumbum

    Thanks for saving my butt!  Teaching at a music camp without a hard drive full of music is hard. This fix was easy!

  • keokimeddle

    It worked but now it want’s me to format it.  It’s a 2 TB drive with a ton of shit on it fml.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1185640026 Rick Meredith

    WOW, this is amazing. Worked perfectly. Thank you so much!

  • Last808

    This worked… after a lot of worrying about losing data from a system w/ a burned out CPU, it works. I couldn’t read it on linux, OS X, XP or this Win7 install until I did this. 

    Now, can you tell me why this works and why Dynamic disk doesn’t?

  • Barry

    Didn’t work for me at all disk still shows as dynamic and is inaccessible, in answer to the question why it’s because Microsoft don’t want it to work http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/win7-ultimate-wont-read-dynamic-disk/bad7a742-6822-4abd-8489-fd33cd839fd7?tab=AllReplies#tabs

    Of course in works on the newest (and maybe other) Ubuntu which stands to reason, Microsoft don’t support their own technologies they let others do it.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark-Paj?k/676640350 Mark Paj?k

    WOWZERS. Although somewhat terrifying this worked perfectly – thanks. I needed to work on a maxtor 250GB drive connected externally via usb – windows 7 said the drive was invalid until I made the change. Only difficulty was working out which drive was the right one – process of elimination did it – found a text string I recognised that could only belong to the external drive – changed the ’42′ to ’07′ and it works fin now!

    Many thanks

  • Krai65

    It worked as described.

  • Marcin Miasik

    How to edit in Hex editor?

  • Scott S.

    Hmm- tried this on an old WD 250 GB IDE drive, but can’t save – I get an error saying the disk is write protected. 

  • Pkane

    I also have the same issue as vajumic,
    I get access to the disk, but I only see one of the 3 partitions. How do I recover the other partitions.

  • Profector

    ditto

  • thulasi

    worked like a charm.

  • Walt Williams

    Thank you!  I upgraded to WH2011 after creating a “back up” drive which I neglected to check prior to the upgrade.  When I attempted to restore the files I ran into the invalid problem and this saved me.  Thanks!

  • Chris

    Awesome

  • http://www.facebook.com/beenfishinglately Tom Webb

    same here, can’t find a solution anywhere for multipal partitions

  • Tigeleo

    Very good but how it pointed here I recovery only one from two pertitiions. Someone have idea how to return second?

  • Josephruffolo

    im having the same problem right now . is there a fix ?

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