Ubuntu LiveCD helpes with Dynamic Disk

I never know what kinds of issues I'll run across at my office. I may be the one and only tech guy, but there's still plenty of computers that have been at work here longer than I have, and some applications that still behave as "black boxes" to me. So sometimes very unusual issues arise that I cannot explain.

Today, I had to update the AT&T Global Dialer VPN software. Unfortunately, the new version must have a computer with XP or later, and alas, the computer that needed it was running Windows 2000. So while I'm not very happy about this prospect, I begin prep work to get it updated to XP.

Again, there's "black box" software on here, and by that I mean that not only do I not know how to use it (I rarely know how to use our medical software, because then I'd be a clerk or a nurse), but I also don't know how to install it. So in the interests of not breaking black boxes, I opt to do a full XP install and dual-boot with Windows 2000. This should be a cinch. I've done it before. No problem.

Problem.

For some inexplicable reason, the Windows 2000 partition was a "Dyamic Disk" rather than a normal partition, and when I installed XP on a second, unused partition, the boot.ini became unavailable, and rendered booting into Windows 2000 useless, although XP booted fine. Further, XP could not access any files on the Dynamic Disk - the XP Disk Manager saw it was there, but because it was Dynamic, it couldn't do anything with it except wipe it. Which would be bad.

Now I don't have any problem re-installing the regular programs from scratch and restoring people's backup files from the server, but there's this black box software on the computer that I didn't want to break, and now it's, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson, "broken."

Instead of reading up and trying to repair boot sectors and blahdeeblah, I skipped ahead to the last resort and booted up using an Ubuntu LiveCD. Sure enough, Ubuntu was able to mount and give access to the Dynamic Disk without any nagging. I was able to copy the black box onto the server and then copy it back to the Windows XP install and voila - working again.

Once again, Ubuntu/Linux saves the day when Windows doesn't make any sense.