I finally bit the bullet and bought a 300Gb drive and Windows XP home for my PC. Up until now I was running win2k. I unplugged the old drives plug in the new one and installed XP. After getting it up an running I plugged in my old data drive to copy all the files over to the new drive and discovered it was a "dynamic" partition rather than "basic" which meant xp wouldn't read it.

Does anyone know of a way to convert it to 'basic' without losing the data ? If I need to I can probably use a work PC to get to the files and put them onto a usb drive but I'm hoping I can get away with not having to do that.

Before you change a dynamic disk back to a basic disk, note that all existing volumes must be deleted from the disk before you can convert it back to a basic disk. If you want to keep your data, back up the data, or move your data to another volume.

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Dynamic Disk Support - Windows XP Professional (like its Windows 2000 equivalent) supports dynamic disks, but Home Edition does not (instead, HE supports only the standard Simple Disk type). Dynamic disks are not usable with any OS other than Windows 2000 or Windows XP Pro, and they cannot be used on portable computers. Likewise, Home Edition does not include the Logical Disk Manager.

You're screwed basicaly.

or maybe not? http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1806

Personaly, I wouldn't even beging to dick with dynamic disks unless you had all your 300gb backed up, and even then you might aswell do a copy to one drive, format, copy back.

you can tinker around with all that, or I can bring my PC around with XP pro installed and you can copy over network or whatever to your new HDD

theres an invite for sex if i ever i heard one, go stinky.