Error Message "Cannot Proceed with the Upgrade" When a Basic Disk Is Converted to Dynamic (267146)

SYMPTOMS

When you use Microsoft Windows 2000 Disk Management to upgrade a basic disk to dynamic, the disk conversion process may stop and you may receive the following error message:

[Disk Management]
Cannot proceed with the upgrade. Unable to get information about an existing basic volume.

CAUSE

When Disk Management attempts to convert a basic disk to dynamic, it checks for the following items:

It queries the disks selected by the user and ensures that all volumes with at least one extent have all extents in the group of disks selected (all associated members of legacy volume sets, stripes, stripe sets with parity, or mirror disks).
It ensures that the status of all volumes on all disks is acceptable.
It ensures that all partitions on the disks chosen to be upgraded are enumerated and accounted for by Windows 2000 volume manager.

If any fault tolerant volumes in the system are unhealthy or inaccessible (whether or not the volumes have been chosen to be upgraded), the disk conversion process stops.

If a partition is created outside of Windows 2000 Disk Management (for example, when you use the Microsoft Windows NT Windisk.exe program) and the system is not restarted, the volume manager is unaware of that volume and causes the disk conversion process to stop.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this behavior, you can use either of the two following methods:

Restart the Windows 2000 operating system to ensure all partitions and volumes are re-enumerated and are known to the volume manager.

-or-
Ensure that all volumes are acceptable and all legacy fault tolerant set members are present. If you have a broken or failed redundancy fault tolerant member, repair the volume, and then try to upgrade the disks to dynamic.

The Disk Management tool does not allow you to break a previously failed mirror disk set. Your only menu choices are to delete or to repair the volume. If another disk drive with enough unallocated space is not available for the repair, you should either add another disk drive to the system to repair the volume, or back up the volume, delete it, re-create a new simple volume, and then restore the data from backup. This process removes the failed redundancy status for that volume and enables the basic disk to dynamic disk conversion process.

MORE INFORMATION

For additional information about dynamic and basic storage, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

175761 Dynamic versus Basic Storage in Windows 2000