About recovery of dynamic/GPT disks and volumes

Recovery of dynamic volumes

You can recover dynamic volumes to the following locations on the local hard drives:

• Dynamic volume.

  Manual resizing of dynamic volumes during recovery to dynamic disks is not supported. If you need to resize a dynamic volume during recovery, it should be recovered to a basic disk.

  • Original location (to the same dynamic volume).

    The target volume type does not change.

  • Another dynamic disk or volume.

    The target volume type does not change. For example, when recovering a dynamic striped volume over a dynamic spanned volume the target volume remains spanned.

  • Unallocated space of the dynamic group.

    The recovered volume type will be the same as it was in the backup.

• Basic volume or disk.

  The target volume remains basic.

• Bare-metal recovery.

  When performing a so called "bare-metal recovery" of dynamic volumes to a new unformatted disk, the recovered volumes become basic. If you want the recovered volumes to remain dynamic, the target disks should be prepared as dynamic (partitioned and formatted). This can be done using third-party tools, for example, Windows Disk Management snap-in.

Recovery of basic volumes and disks

• When recovering a basic volume to an unallocated space of the dynamic group, the recovered volume becomes dynamic.
• When recovering a basic disk to a dynamic disk of a dynamic group consisting of two disks, the recovered disk remains basic. The dynamic disk to which the recovery is performed becomes "missing" and a spanned/striped dynamic volume on the second disk becomes "failed".

Partition style after recovery

The target disk's partition style depends on whether your computer supports UEFI and on whether your system is BIOS-booted or UEFI-booted. See the following table:

	My system is BIOS-booted (Windows or Acronis bootable media)	My system is UEFI-booted (Windows or Acronis bootable media)
My source disk is MBR and my OS does not support UEFI	The operation will not affect neither partition layout nor bootability of the disk: partition style will remain MBR, the destination disk will be bootable in BIOS.	After operation completion, the partition style will be converted to GPT style, but the operating system will fail booting from UEFI, since your operating system does not support it.
My source disk is MBR and my OS supports UEFI	The operation will not affect neither partition layout nor bootability of the disk: partition style will remain MBR, the destination disk will be bootable in BIOS.	The destination partition will be converted to GPT style that will make the destination disk bootable in UEFI. See Example of recovery to UEFI system.
My source disk is GPT and my OS supports UEFI	After operation completion, the partition style will remain GPT, the system will fail booting on BIOS, because your operating system cannot support booting from GPT on BIOS.	After operation completion, the partition style will remain GPT, the operating system will be bootable on UEFI.