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I have a Yoga720-15IKB laptop running Windows 10. I wanted to dual boot Ubuntu 22.04 and Windows, so I shrank my C: drive (the only main partition at the moment) on the only drive (an SSD) in the laptop, and created 2 more partitions using the free space. One was for installing Ubuntu and the other was like a shared space for storage for both operating systems.

During the Ubuntu installation, I selected Something else, and reformatted the partition I wanted to install to, then installed Ubuntu to that partition. Now I could boot into both Windows and Ubuntu without any issue, but the partitions were not right.

Windows Disk Management:

Windows Disk Management

It only shows my C: drive but with a red cross, and it doesn't show any other partition info and I can't do any disk operation here. (There shouldn't be an issue with Windows Disk Management because it can show any external drive correctly).

Then I tried to fix this with a Windows recovery USB drive. I loaded the recovery environment and tried diskpart. When I ran list disk I saw this:

list disk photo

It only showed my USB drive as disk 1, but can't see my internal SSD (normally disk 0). Then I tried sel disk 0 anyway and it was still able to select my SSD somehow. Then I did list partition and I saw this.

list partition photo

This time it seems to be showing the partitions correctly unless I missed something, but I still don't know how to fix it or even what caused this. I think I also tried the auto "Startup Repair" and the fixmbr command in the recovery environment, but I had no luck.

I even tried to reinstall Windows, but during the installation when I needed to select the drive/partition to install Windows, the installer couldn't find any drive, like this.

Windows installer photo

Does anyone know what this issue is and how to fix it? It would be better if I can fix it without reinstalling either operating system or even reformatting.

karel
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Zitao Qiu
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  • You created dynamic partitions which is proprietary to Windows & has no undo with Windows. Some third party Windows tools may work. https://askubuntu.com/questions/482768/changing-windows-dynamic-disk-partition-to-basic-partition-and-not-the-full-driv & https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2325331&p=13492758&viewfull=1#post13492758 If you have Windows 10 in UEFI with gpt, you do not even need dynamic partiitons. It was another work around for the 4 primary partition limit in MBR(msdos). – oldfred Jan 17 '23 at 15:25
  • @guiverc, sorry, I thought it was just a minor version number. It's 22.04, I edited the question. – Zitao Qiu Jan 17 '23 at 16:52
  • @oldfred, thanks, I will try that later. – Zitao Qiu Jan 17 '23 at 16:56
  • @oldfred, sharing my updates. I ended up using the free version of the AOMEI Partition Assistant to convert my dynamic partitions to basic partitions. After the conversion, I couldn't boot into any system. Maybe it's because the boot table was destroyed, either by the ubuntu installation or by the AOMEI Partition Assistant. Anyway, I tried the auto "Startup Repair" and the fixmbr command in the recovery environment again, no luck. But this time, the windows installer was able to recognize the partitions. So, I did a clean Windows install then reinstalled Ubuntu. Now everything's working. – Zitao Qiu Jan 22 '23 at 20:28

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